Yes, you read that title correctly. In December 2023, Duolingo fired a large percentage of their contract translators, according to the workers who were laid off.
A company spokesperson said Monday:
“We just no longer need as many people to do the type of work some of these contractors were doing. Part of that could be attributed to AI.”
What happened to the translators who remained?
They were simply asked to review A.I. translated material to “make sure it’s acceptable.” However, another former employee shared that they didn’t have anyone on their language course’s team to stay and check A.I. material at all:
The majority of comments on the post expressed anger against Duolingo's actions, with many noting that this decision goes against the company's sales pitch of using native speakers.
Duolingo users are concerned about how this transition might affect the quality of the platform.
Take for example the following 100% machine-translated menu:
Duolingo would argue that their translations are still reviewed by humans before being used anywhere, but this only marginally adds a human element to the translation.
There's a difference between a human coming up with their own translation and a human starting with an AI's translation. The human reviewers are forced to adapt to what the AI has given them to work with, which could be devoid of context. such as in this translation:
Pepsi’s original slogan: “Come Alive! You’re in the Pepsi Generation!” got translated into Chinese as “Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back From the Dead”.
In commercial uses, the impact of a mistranslation doesn’t seem big, other than getting a few laughs out of us.
But what happens when a learning platform with 500 million users relies on A.I. to teach intricate and culturally-rich human language?
Since Duolingo has been using artificial intelligence for some time, users have already begun to notice the difference in quality.
Many native speakers of major languages such as French, Spanish, and English, complain about the incorrect sentences in their courses. The pronunciations are robotic and unnatural, and the answers it provides are clumsy or even incorrect.
A Portuguese learner pointed out numerous errors with the Portuguese course in particular:
“I had to translate a sentence using the word "talk," but it only accepted the translation for the word "walk."
It is specifically a sentence with "this," but only accepts the translation for "that."
Sometimes, it only accepts the female translation of a word like "engineer" or "teacher," or only accepts the plural translation of a word like "you" when there is no indication of gender or several people being referenced in the English sentence.
In a few sentences, it uses the word "the" but only accepts the translation with the indefinite articles.”
Smaller languages are probably no longer even being reviewed by anyone, so if you don't already know a native speaker, you won't know if what you’re learning is correct or not.
It’s possible that incorporation of A.I. might speed up the creation of other courses on Duolingo that we have waited so long for, but at what price? Language cannot exist without humans to speak it. It is audacious to strip language education of the one thing that makes it so special to us language learners, but only time will tell how this will affect the quality of courses moving forward.
Until then, take this article as an excuse to save yourself the $50 on that Super Duolingo subscription...
Wishing you a productive study session,
langstudies
“neither money nor machines can create. They shuttle tokens of energy, but they do not transform. A civilization based on them puts people out of touch with their creative powers.”
― Lewis Hyde, Alcohol and Poetry
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