The way they are planning on doing that is the interesting part of the piece:
The site this month will launch versions in French, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. These international sites will be populated with BuzzFeed posts that originally appeared in English, but BuzzFeed won't be using professional translators to create them. Instead, BuzzFeed's posts will be translated by crowds of foreign-language speakers who are learning English using an app called Duolingo. In theory, as part of their coursework, these hordes will translate a BuzzFeed post in a matter of hours—at a quality that rivals that of professional translators, but at the speed, scale and price that you'd get from a machine.
If it works—and BuzzFeed's tests say it does—the effort could prove the utility of something known as human computation, a theory that argues that instead of rivaling one another, machines and humans can get more done by banding together.
In some ways BuzzFeed really bugs me. I don't like the fake ads disguised as articles, and I don't like the cynical way they bring in visitors, but I have to admit I admire them for being innovative.
