/** Sentences by capita **/

Just to continue on this Wall-rampage (anyone know whether the etymology has anything to do with ramparts?) of mine, here is the sentence list ordered by number of sentences ... per million native speakers.

http://martin.swift.is/tatoeba/...uage_by_capita

Romansh and Faroese don't look so feeble any more, eh? :-)

Over chains of translations, the tags may no longer be appropriate. Consider:
“He was visited by the Grim Reaper.”
“Maðurinn með ljáinn sótti hann heim.”
“The man with the scythe paid him a visit.”

Let's hope people who aren't aware of that don't contribute sentences in those languages.

Apple, by the way, makes life easy and picks the correct quotation marks depending on the keyboard language setting. Linux makes life hard, forcing you to think about what you're doing (oh, the humanity!).

Tatoeba, by the way, doesn't like spaces in URLs, so you'll have to use http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/An...ndere_Sprachen
The corresponding information can be found in English here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qu...-English_usage

/** Comments anchor **/

Some links on Tatoeba are generated with a “#comments” anchor, but there is no element with that ID (the list has a “comments” class which is possibly where this came from). Perhaps add it to the comments heading?

/** Quotation marks **/

Yet another topic from sentence discussions[1]: Unfortunately many keyboard setups don't include keys for both opening and closing quotation marks so I thought I'd post here on the Wall where one finds these on Macs and how to set it up on Linux, should your layout not provide it.

Apple's operating system has this key under the “[” key (on the US keyboard). Just press “alt option” and the key for the opening quotation mark. Shifting gives you the closing.

On Linux, I added
key <AB04> { [ v, V, doublelowquotemark ] };
key <AB05> { [ b, B, leftdoublequotemark ] };
key <AB06> { [ n, N, rightdoublequotemark ] };
to my xkb symbols file in
/usr/share/X11/symbols/

If anyone knows how to get these glyphs in Windows, please add that information here below.

[1] http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentence...33644#comments

/** Ninja links **/

Another issue from sentence discussion: It seems that some links don't show up in the logs on sentence pages. An example is the link between
http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/30367
and
http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/371124

The logs show links of the former to
193202, 408519, 738322, 832081 and 832101
and the latter to
193202 and 832076
but neither a link to each other, despite being linked.

Just wanted to bring this up in case it was of any importance.

/** Adoption of contentious sentences **/

There has come up the issue of whether it's reasonable to adopt contentious sentences. Seeing how it didn't relate to the sentence where it was brought up[1] but still might be of relevance to the community, I figured I'd bring this to the wall rather than restrict its scope to a private message.

My view is that one shouldn't feel obliged to leave a sentence an orphan just because someone disagrees on its correctness. Nor should one consider it disingenuous if someone else adopts a sentence one doesn't agree with. Just as it's not considered necessary to orphan a sentence that someone finds fault with until the matter is resolved, it is fine to adopt an orphan being discussed. Owning a sentence doesn't mean one gets to overrule consensus or ignore evidence.

Furthermore, this hasn't been a problem in my experience. Discussions sometimes take a while when people are passionate or get entrenched in their position, but things tend to sort themselves out eventually. When a need to change the sentence is demonstrated and supported by broad consensus, the owner simply modifies the sentence or orphans it to allow someone else to adopt it.

In the rare occasion where an owner simply ignores the request, a moderator usually takes care of it after a couple of weeks without any further problems.

[1] http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/303422

In the interest of keeping things simple, I'd advise a two-point policy:
1) Don't be a dick.
2) Try not to get offended.

In case it's fine to mention this here, and seeing how you're still working on changes to this interface, here are a couple of feature requests:

Turn that little arrow between the translate-from and translate-to language selectors in the search form into a clickable element which swaps the two languages. I find that I regularly search for words of phrases back and forth between two languages.

An alternative method would be to remove the distinction between the two so that a search would look for matches in both languages. I'm not sure if this would work well between similar languages, though.

I think the second suggestion has been brought up before, and may actually not be worth the effort depending on the details of the implementation of the new database and how things will get glued together. Anyway, it would be great to get the option to collapse the two lines which each Japanese entry gets in the interface down into one with the furigana reading being optional.

That way, people with browsers or plugins that parse ruby markup “correctly” could then simplify things a little bit. At the same time, this may well complicate the rendering a fair bit (the sentence would have ruby, but once clicked, the text input element would have the plain text).

Maybe it would help to be able to toggle between browse- and contribute-modes. In the browse mode, one could filter out everything but the languages that one's interested in, but then one could switch to contribution mode to get a more inclusive view.

Something like a link in the upper right corner, near the other interface settings.

Welcome to Tatoeba Bre,

There are a little over five hundred sentences in Basque, currently here in the Tatoeba corpus. You can browse these by hovering your pointer over the "Browse" menu in the top left corner of the (English) interface, selecting "Browse by language" and then the language you're looking for. That would bring you to
http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentence.../eus/none/none

Searching for "badago" turns up a few entries:
http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentence...rom=und&to=und

I think we should rather go for a more positive definition of what is a "good translation". I guess it depends on what you want to achieve with that text.

Oh, I may have misunderstood you. Personally I think it's quite clear, but it may be worth pre-empting a misunderstanding.

How about something like: "Sentences must match in meaning and tone. Try to think how the same person would say the same thing in a different language given a comparable situation/audience. It's often difficult to get the right balance, but be careful not to translate a sentence too literally/word-for-word."

I think it's worth mentioning the word-for-word bit because my impression is that people have a tendency (I've also caught me doing this) to translate too literally.

We could also mention a few related tags:
* Literal Translation
* loose translation
* localised translation
* Adapted Translation
* cmt on translation
and even
* translation challenge
* hard to translate
* translated wordplay
* translated idiom
* joke translation
* translated lyric
* translated-proverb
* translated proverb
* translated-quote
(ough... time to work on these again)

I similarly disagree. Often the best translation between related languages happen to be word-for-word translations of one another, but this is an artefact and not a value to measure the quality of a translation by.

The point of uttering sentences is to convey a message. Translate its meaning, not the words used.

Documentation is always tricky. Mainly because no-one reads it. I've long wanted to create a screencast for Tatoeba, but never gotten the damn software to work.

CK and I have set up pages with tags for people to look up available tags at. Trusted users are, I think, just expected to do a bit of work browsing around for good practices.

... or ask here on the wall. :-)

I've chosen to write things out the way it'd normally be written in that language. On sentences with numbers or some other type of reading ambiguity I leave a comment and tag the sentence with "cmt on reading".

> From what I remembered of what sysko told me at the time he implemented that page, it's complicated ^^

No problem. Just figured I'd ask.

> From what I remembered of what sysko told me at the time he implemented that page, it's complicated ^^

Ough... I feel very silly not having thought of that...

Thanks, Trang.

How about making the "Show translations in:" feature actually filter only those translations for the results?

That way
http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentence...n/eng/isl/none
would only show those few thousand sentences with a direct or indirect Icelandic translation, rather than the hundred and seventy thousand total English sentences.

Ah, sorry. I misread that second point as referring to the tag-removal link. Wishful thinking, I guess... :-)

:-D