Duolingo: double your pleasure?
Big Lou at CMU is working on a language-learning and web-translation project, known in the lingo as Duolingo.
Class this with Meedan and livemocha under “facets of global collaborative translation that need to happen”: it’s one of a long line of shared translation efforts that I admire and follow; though I’ve yet to see one that was able to take a deep breath and just let the process unfold naturally.
I hope this one is different. I want it to be a pillar of our multilingual Web, not just one piece among thousands. They need some design help for an amazing poster campaign to Free Language Learning — see their latest blog post for an example. If you have a brainstorm on the topic, post up!
Google to cancel its translate API, citing ‘extensive abuse’
Google’s APIs Product Manager Adam Feldman announced on Thursday they will cancel the Google translate API by December, without replacing it, and that all use of it will be throttled until then. Any reusers or libraries relying on the translate API to programmatically provide a better multilingual experience will have to switch over to another translation service. (Some simple services will still be available to users, such as google.com/translate, but APIs will not be available to developers of other sites, libraries, or services.)
Ouch. This is a sudden shift, both from their strong earlier support for this API (I was personally encouraged to use it for applications by colleagues at Google), and from their standing policy of supporting deprecated services for up to 3 years. What could have spooked them? Why the rush? As of today, the Translate API page reads:
The Google Translate API has been officially deprecated as of May 26, 2011. Due to the substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse, the number of requests you may make per day will be limited and the API will be shut off completely on December 1, 2011.
Most disappointing to me is the way this announcement was released: buried in a blog post full of minor “Spring Cleaning” updates to a dozen other APIs. Most of the other deprecated APIs were replaced by reasonable equivalents or alternatives, and were being maintained indefinitely with limits on the rate of requests per user. None of them is being cancelled within six months, and none of them are half as widely used!
I hope that this obfuscation was an unintentional oversight. There have been 170 irate replies to that post so far, almost all about the Translate API cancellation. But it has been three days already without any significant update from Feldman or any mention of the change on the Google Translate blog. Google’s response to a ZDNet inquiry was that they have no further information to provide on why they made this decision.
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