Duolingo looks like its more about language education, instead of translation. Should be interesting. I'm curious too.
I'm not so sure about that. Just as reCAPTCHA seems like it's just aimed at blocking robots but is really digitizing thousands (millions?) of books, this project claims to do education and translation.
Google Translate is nigh-unusable for anything besides French, Spanish, and sometimes German. Russian is bad enough -- Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are incomprehensible.
I've seen Google Translate do excellent translations for Russian, Hebrew, and Arabic. Certainly not fully gramatically correct, but accurate enough to convey the meaning of virtually every sentence and paragraph -- which is the point of machine translation.
For western languages, yes - for others, not so much. It's still pretty bad for chinese/japanese/korean - even if it's better than anything else out there.
The question is, will Duolingo be able to beatbox?