Chipping in for mini-story translators

So, I have already been shamelessly taking advantage of the ‘get 60 mini-stories translated and recorded and we’ll get the language supported’ offer by trying to cajole my friends into helping with Bulgarian, Hungarian, Hindi, but, at the risk of giving poor Zoran a heart attack, here’s my proposal to the userbase:

Even if the LingQ staff understandably do not want to pay for translators for languages that are unlikely to get enough new subscribers to be worth the expense, if enough of us are willing to contribute to pay one or more translators for an obscure language that we might be interested in, and where it looks unlikely that anyone who speaks it would be willing to do it in exchange for free subscriptions, it hopefully wouldn’t be that expensive for any one of us to contribute a share of those costs.

(Site admins, if this is not okay, please let me know and I’ll delete the post).

I would potentially be willing to chip in for translators for:
Punjabi*
Breton
Mongolian
Sakha (Yakut)
Scots Gaelic
Tuvan
Georgian
at least one Dravidian language - not sure which one because I don’t know which parts of South India I’ll want to visit - leaning towards Kannada*
…and, what the heck, maybe also Klingon (despite Steve Kaufmann’s vehement lack of interest, according to the online hangouts).

(I don’t promise to learn all of these in my lifetime, but I’m more likely to if they’re on LingQ)

Also, Finnish, which is on the site already - but it would still be useful to have the mini-stories, both in standard literary Finnish and in one of the more common spoken dialects.

Anyone else potentially interested in any of these, or want to make a sub-thread for other obscure languages?

[*Edit - yes, I am aware of the weirdness of calling these languages with many millions of speakers ‘obscure’, but hey, it’s not my fault that you can’t find much teaching material for them]

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Yep, I could pay for Thai, if that was a reasonable amount

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I think they already have people working on Thai, though I’m not sure if that project has stalled.

I remember reading that Thai has something along the lines of 20 mini stories and that, lingq still needs 20-25 mini stories before launching.

I would chip in for Catalan. I believe there was one guy working on some mini stories but he might have stalled out

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Or LingQ could set up a crowdfund to get some languages up and running?
I’d Personally love to see Swahili, Hindi and Serbian/Croatian.

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Id chip in for Thai and or Vietnamese

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Yes I’ll contribute to getting Thai done if it can be done for a reasonable cost and leads to the language getting promptly added to the app. We can start looking into it maybe?

Need to find out how many words it would be so we can ascertain the cost of translation. We could probably find a translator at a reasonable cost through Fiverr, once we know how much there is to get done.

Interested? I guess it’s stories from 20-40 we need?

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Ok assuming we needed 20 stories, they are approximately 400 words each , that’s 8000 words. The cheapest translation I’ve found on fiverr for that amount of words is £66 GBP from an initial look . That translator is active too with lots of good feedback, price seems reasonable.

Anyway… just to give you an idea, thanks.

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I’m happy to chip in, so currently we’re at £33 each if its just the two of us.

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I thought that they required the full set of 60 before putting a new language on the site, but I’m having trouble locating the forum thread where that was written.

I’d love to see this for Norwegian.

Other languages I dabble in would be great too, and I may be interested in pooling resources for:
Irish, Icelandic, Hindi/Urdu, Vietnamese, Georgian, Maltese, Amharic, Faroese, Romansh, or Hawaiian.

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“I’m happy to chip in, so currently we’re at £33 each if its just the two of us”
Yeah it’s not too bad a price really.

That would get us the translation but we have to get them recorded too though by a native speaker. I’m not in Thailand atm so it’s not the easiest task, let me think.

" I thought that they required the full set of 60 before putting a new language on the site, but I’m having trouble locating the forum thread where that was written “” I’m not sure, I’m just going by what was said on the thread related to getting Thai on the app. Obviously we need to know that we can get the language on before we go to the effort of getting the material translated and recorded.

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I’d been looking at voice overs at Fiverr and it seems to be much more expensive - maybe around 400 USD for 8000 words. Also, most people there claim to be professionals and I don’t think we would want to have the mini stories read in a newscaster’s voice.

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I support the idea, but:
Please no nerd languages!!(*) Fully implementing, hosting, and maintaining them would still cause costs we all would have to pay for. I would rather use the money on improving the system itself.
I would very much like to see smaller languages here, even dialects, because LingQ’s unique structure could allow it to become a sanctuary for languages on the brink of extinction.

*I am not talking about artificial languages of general interest like Esperanto. These are very useful even if they are not as successful as they could be. But Klingon etc will never play a major role outside the scene they are coming from. Apart from the fact that you need Klingon anatomy to speak it like a native :wink:

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To be fair, Mark Okrand consciously devised it to be as unlike any existing human languages as he could while still being pronounceable by human actors - all of the sounds that it incorparates are sounds that exist in some human language, and the only ones that are really odd to an English speaker are the German-like ‘H’ (like German ‘ch’), the Chinese-like ‘S’, the Hindi-like retroflex ‘D’, the Tlingit or Nahuatl-like ‘tlh’, the Arabic-like ‘q’ and the Georgian-like ‘Q’.

And … okay, sure, it is a nerd language, but so too is Esperanto; it just happened to spark off a much larger community of nerds :slight_smile:

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Of those, I’m up for Hindi/Urdu and Georgian. There is already someone I know working on Hindi. Not sure how likely she is to get the full set done, or how likely she is to want to make use of the free X months subscrption; if she would prefer to receive some financial compensation for the work, maybe we and anyone else who’s keen could offer to pool together. Anyone else for Hindi / Georgian?

I should also say, I’ll be at the Polyglot Gathering in a few days, so will be doing my best to try to talk about the mini-stories to native speakers of interesting languages that are not already on the site, so if I meet anyone fluent in those other ones, I’ll try to see if they’re interested.

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" I’d been looking at voice overs at Fiverr and it seems to be much more expensive " …

Yeah paying for a voice over person isn’t realistic. Need to find someone to record them. I’ll ask my Thai teacher next time I see her, she may be able to help, if she has the time, not sure yet.

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That’s some interesting details about Klingon I didn’t know about, thank you :slight_smile:

But still… Esperanto ended up being a nerd language in a way, yes, but of course it wasn’t intended that way.

Guessing nobody is interested enough in Thai, so we’re gonna have to wait a while!