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They were asking for english translations of words in various languages - hoping to determine the demographics of the workers solving the captchas.

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are you sure? I thought they were simply postulating that native speakers would more accurately 'capture' the characters of a word/phrase if they recognized it from their own language. If you know what a word is supposed to be, then it's easier to read messy writing. I realize I could find out by just reading the PDF paper, but I think it's worth answering here for the benefit of HN readers

Interesting. I just read the PDF to see - they were sending captchas where the goal was to translate a series of written numbers in the native language into roman numerals. So (une)-(deux)-(trois) --> 1 2 3 along with instructions for solving the captcha in the related language.

As best I can tell, the klingon used wasn't even in a latin font. So the correct answers were essentially translating arbitrary symbols into their associated numbers. Certainly throws off what I was assuming from the blog read.

They do note that the service, ImageToText, was the most expensive by far.

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