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I don't understand what difference it makes being in Klingon? usually Captchas are just jibberish anyway. Recognizing individual letters remains the challenge.

They used the Klingon alphabet, which is nothing like the latin alphabet

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

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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