I uploaded something to get translated from English to Spanish. Over time, it got a few votes, and eventually I decided to get it translated to German.

When I uploaded the article to the new language, it suddenly had 8 votes... instantly. That's the same number of votes that it had in the Spanish section. I checked the German-to-English section, to see what was going on; the article I had uploaded was not visible on the New list.

So basically, my article is not going to be translated; Duolingo thinks the article is millions of years old, so it isn't on the New list, and no German learning English is ever going to see it.

EDIT: I was mistaken about the article not being on the new list; the article did appear on the new list after all. (I had my settings set funny so I didn't see it the first time). However, the votes are still linked, so the newly-uploaded article did have a lot of upvotes.