Projects like these require huge numbers of participants, and Duolingo already has them.

“The language translations market is huge,” he says. This service is already earning Duolingo hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, but von Ahn predicts he will be adding a raft of new clients soon. So far, Duolingo has contracts with BuzzFeed and CNN to translate stories from English into languages such as Spanish, French, and Portuguese. By melding together enough stabs at this task from high-level Duolingo users, the app can render a surprisingly accurate translation. Which will turn out to be, say, a BuzzFeed article. At the end of some lessons, Duolingo will ask you if you want to practice by translating a real-world document. If it doesn’t charge users and, so far, doesn’t serve them any ads, how does Duolingo make money? It tricks you into working as an unpaid translation service. He came to the United States to attend college and graduate school, then went on to become a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon and eventually a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship. You need to attend a good middle school that has a foreign languages department, or buy a program like Rosetta Stone that can cost hundreds of dollars.” Von Ahn himself grew up in Guatemala but went to a school with English classes. “And learning a language usually requires money. “The majority of people in the world who want to learn a language are learning English because it might get them a better job,” says von Ahn.

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