NKNGO-LANG · Commercial & Contributor Terms · Version 2026-10-10
Terms of Service, Contributor Agreement & Data Rights
These Terms govern access to and use of the NKNGO LANG platform, including the translation workbench, transcription tools, organization workspaces, developer APIs, and publishing services. By creating an account, accepting an assignment, or submitting content, you agree to these Terms.
1. The Platform Model: Fair Pay and Language Data Rights
NKNGO LANG is a commercial technology and linguistic dataset platform. We compensate verified independent translators, transcribers, and contributors for their labor according to agreed per-unit rates (such as per-word rates for text or per-minute rates for audio alignment/recording).
Grant of Data Rights: In consideration for platform access and compensation paid, all contributors grant NKNGO an irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, fully paid-up, royalty-free, transferable license to store, review, clean, annotate, format, publish, license, and utilize all submitted translations, audio recordings, text alignments, and linguistic metadata for any purpose, including without limitation:
- Training, fine-tuning, and evaluating machine learning, translation, and speech recognition AI models.
- Building public and commercial datasets, dictionaries, and linguistic corpora.
- Deploying commercial and public translation APIs and language services.
2. Enterprise, Agencies, and Commercial Organizations
Third-party translation agencies, transcription service providers, and business clients may establish Organization accounts to coordinate their linguistic operations:
- Team Management: Organizations may invite their own linguists and transcribers to execute projects under their supervision.
- Client Deliverables: Organizations retain the right to deliver completed translation and transcription outputs to their end clients.
- Corpus Retained: Anonymized text translations and voice recordings processed through platform tools remain part of the NKNGO linguistic repository to improve general language capability and model performance.
3. Voice and Audio Contributions
Contributors submitting voice recordings confirm that all audio provided is their own original recording or submitted with full legal authorization. Approved audio files are retained permanently in cold storage and training vaults for acoustic and phonetic speech modeling.
4. Payments and Payout Schedules
Independent contributors earn balances based on approved tasks. Rates and payment schedules are specified in your active workspace profile. Payouts are executed via supported commercial payout methods (such as direct bank transfer, eWallet, or verified payout partners) upon administrative review and verification of submitted work.
5. Multilingual Native Content (Blogs)
Users publishing native language articles retain moral authorship over their published writing. By publishing on the platform, authors grant NKNGO the right to host the article publicly and to ingest the content into the translation pipeline to generate derivative translations across other supported native African languages.
6. Developer APIs and Training Data Usage
Users issued Developer API keys are permitted to programmatically extract and train on their authorized dataset partitions. API keys must not be shared, exposed in public repositories, or used to conduct denial-of-service or scraping attacks against platform infrastructure.