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To the "person",
I'd like the "person" not to recommend users to ignore my sentences.
I think that the "person" doesn't have the right to do that in public.
So I tell that "person": please refrain from posting such scandalous messages.
I also would like that "person" to know that I'm denouncing this in public and I'm very displeased with this.
PS: To comply with a request sent to me by Tatoeba's admins, I've edited this message so that the "person" would no longer be named directly.
This is what the "person" said in a comment (he later deleted) about this sentence #3989509:
"Tommy,
I'd recommend ignoring a lot of this person's English sentences."
I publicly denounce this and I ask the "person" to refrain from posting such messages in public.
+1
+1, with all the due respect to CK's otherwise productive contributions.
+0,5
There are people who do overestimate their abilities and end up producing rather distorted sentences that need a lot of work, distracting other contributors from more productive pastimes. However, there are also people who exhibit due diligence and care, and their error rate isn't much worse than that of native speakers, plus most of their mistakes are corrected quite easily. CK does not distinguish between the two types, apparently believing that either is acting in a way detrimental to Tatoeba. His reasons are plainly understandable, but I do not agree with them fully, since I see Tatoeba not only as a learning tool, but also as a way to exchange ideas (expressed in sentences). Original sentences in any language bar the most popular ones rarely get translated. Translating them into English (or any other popular language) to the best of one's ability may not yield perfect results, but, if good enough, it will do the job to convey the idea, and then a willing native - those exist - can come and see if the sentence is alright, and I don't see a problem with that unless the sentence is so garbled as to be incomprehensible and require significant reworking. Basically it's a question of whether the effort gone into checking is worth the contribution into the corpus that sentence makes. I'd say it is, as long as the occasional mistakes are easily correctable, which I believe has been the case for Amastan's English sentences so far.
Ooneykcall,
Thanks for your message. I totally agree with all what you've said. I'd like to add the following:
>>>> and then a willing native - those exist - can come and see if the sentence is alright...
Whew! And thank God they exist! And they'll always exist. They'll always keep coming to Tatoeba and commenting non-Native-speaker sentences. They'll always be there. Tatoeba's life and quality doesn't depend just on one person's work, no matter how important that person think they are. I've contributed many Amazigh (Berber) sentences and if I die, there will always be people who would take care of the Amazigh corpus. Anyway, that's the way we're working with many other languages: Turkish users contributing sentences in French, US users contributing sentences in Chinese and Hebrew, German users contributing in Japanese, and Russian users contributing in Arabic. We welcome people to contribute in our languages, we correct their sentences, discuss errors with them, explain them, weave friendly relations with them. I think that's what Tatoeba is supposed to be. It should be a website loved by people, visitors and contributors alike, and not a place where they may receive messages that might make them feel worthless. I've spent two good years contributing thousands of sentences to Tatoeba and I have never felt that it was a waste of time. On the contrary, I've learnt millions of new things on this website that one wouldn't have learnt at any school. However, I don't want to receive messages that question and even ridicule one's role in such a free collaborative work. It's the Internet, it's cyberspace... we should enjoy a minumum of freedom at least here, no?
+1
+1
+1.
I would like to thank all the users who support me.
There are many users who complain about similar messages sent by the same person, i.e. the "person", and I encourage other users to denounce such a practice which is counterproductive in a collaborative project like Tatoeba.
For a reminder, the project we are contributing to here is Tatoeba and not some other private project derived from it.
PS: Message edited so the "person"'s nickname would not be mentioned. This is to comply with a recommendation from TB's admins.
I'm not commenting on the way CK communicates here. Also, this is not directed to Amastan or any other particular user, but rather to all the Tatoeba's users.
With all due respect, friends: Tatoeba is NOT the place to come and practice writing English (or any other language). If you are not 100 % sure that the sentence you are going to contribute is correct and natural, don't submit it. This is the very basis of Tatoeba! We are supposed to be collecting a reliable sentence database with as natural sounding sentences as possible. If you want to practice your English/Japanese/you-name-it, you can do that on sites like http://lang-8.com/. But, please, please, please don't submit your sentences here just to see if some native speaker happens to see them and has time to proofread them and comment for improvements. If you are feeling for some reason an overwhelming need to contribute in some other language than your native/strongest language, please do at least ask for proofreading from some native speaker before you submit the sentences in Tatoeba.
I understand the point that some native speaker, who is willing to help, will at some point appear and suggest corrections or ways to make the sentence to sound more natural. But this might take years! And that means we have these unnatural sounding and even incorrect sentences is Tatoeba's database for years. Some people will translate the unnatural/incorrect sentences to some other languages. Then another person believes that the original sentence is a good way to express the idea translation suggest. Google and other search engines are constantly crawling through all the thousands and thousands of sentence pages in Tatoeba and the unnatural/incorrect sentences will appear in search results of those search engines.
Another point is the attractiveness of Tatoeba for new contributors and for potential web/application etc. developers who would like to use our database. Personally, if I'd now registered to some site like Tatoeba and would see people contributing sentences in a foreign language that they have basically translated word for word from their mother tongue, I wouldn't bother with the site. And if I were a developer, I wouldn't want to use such database, because it seemingly contains many mistakes. If we want to be credible and professional project, which I believe we want to be, we need to have only sentences of a good quality.
TL;DR: If you really need to contribute in a foreign language, please verify the correctness of your sentences from reliable source (eg. a native speaker) BEFORE submiting them to Tatoeba.
> If you are not 100 % sure that the sentence you are going to contribute is correct
> and natural, don't submit it. This is the very basis of Tatoeba!
One day this is going to change, hopefully :)
If you ask me personally, I am not happy that contributors need to be 100% sure that a sentence is correct and natural in order to submit it. I'm not happy either that we must only accept correct and natural sentences in Tatoeba. But considering how Tatoeba is currently designed, we can't do otherwise.
I have plans however, and it's still a long way to go, but I believe Tatoeba can have a brighter future where people won't need to relentlessly fight over the quality/correctness of the sentences or translations.
Could you tell us more about those plans? What do you have in mind for Tatoeba if sentences don’t necessarily have to be correct and quality is not an issue?
It would be too long to explain everything but I'll try to explain the main ideas.
At the moment Tatoeba works on these rules:
1. Each sentence can have an owner, and only 1 owner. The owner has the authority over the sentence, they are the ones who can edit it.
2. There can be only one "correctness" for a sentence. If someone says "this is correct" and someone else says "this is not correct", Tatoeba has too make a decision, because a sentence cannot be both correct and incorrect. Plus, the correctness can only be set by admins at the moment.
These are rules that we need to get rid of someday, and instead have something like this:
1. Sentences shouldn't belong to anyone. In our current system, it's necessary to have owners for each sentence to ensure the safety of the corpus. It would be too easy to sabotage the corpus if all the sentences could be edited by anyone. But we can remove the possibility to edit a sentence: once you've added a sentence, it's there, you can't change it, no one can change it. You realized you made a mistake? You just add a new sentence.
2. Everyone should be able to set the correctness of a sentence. The new way to "own" a sentence would be to set it as correct. Several people would be able to set a same sentence to "correct", so a sentence could be "owned" by several people. Several people would also be able to set a same sentence as "incorrect". Users can decide for themselves if they trust a sentence or not by looking at who voted for the sentence to be correct and who voted for it to be incorrect.
Ah, la sagesse des foules qui revient au galop !
Si les foules savaient quelles phrases sont correctes, on n'aurait pas besoin d'éducation. C'est votre idée ?
Ce n'est pas la mienne...
Les langues ne sont pas des gouvernements. On ne les élit pas.
OK, l'anglais marche plus ou moins comme ça. Mais est-ce que parce que l'anglais marche (mal) comme ça, cela doit s'imposer aux autres ? En vertu de quoi ?
Les foules anglophones, qui ignorent royalement l'étymologie, ont décidé qu' "alternative" pouvait prendre plus de 2 états, même si c'est étymologiquement absurde. Est-ce que nous sommes obligés de tous ridiculiser nos langues parce que l'une d'entre elles est ridiculisée ?
Trang, with all due respect, I don't see that happening.
> 1. Sentences shouldn't belong to anyone.
"Each tree is recognized by its own fruit.". I'd even put it as "Each fruit is recognized by its own tree.". Good contributors tend to write good sentences, and bad contributors tend to write bad sentences. This is a fact. There's no universal principle of "correctness"; people should be given the right to turn their eyes upon sentences from users they feel they can trust. There's nothing wrong about this.
a) As long as sentences have an owner, they can be defended by those who wrote them.
b) As long as sentences have an owner, one can safely trust them (by their own set of principles).
c) As long as ownership exists, Tatoeba will be more attractive, because this feeling of "competition" is, to a great extent, our electromotive force.
d) Every good quote has an author. So do bad ones.
> Several people would be able to set a same sentence to "correct",
> so a sentence could be "owned" by several people.
> Several people would also be able to set a same sentence as "incorrect".
Sounds democratic, but I don't see it that way. Let me give you an example. The sentence "I saw him" is extremely simple in English, French, Spanish and probably the great majority of languages in the world, yet it's quite problematic in Portuguese. Learned people know that the correct way of saying it is either "Vi-o" or "Eu o vi", but most people either don't say it that way or don't even understand it that way. It has been proved that this "o" structure is not even assimilated by Brazilian children in the first 6, 7 or 8 years of their existence. They simply don't understand it. It's an abstraction. Ordinary people would simply say "Eu vi ele": the subject-pronoun is used where the object-pronoun should be used. So, who is right?
Today, modern linguistics avoid labelling sentences as "right" or "wrong", that's why we should give the user that autonomy of trusting the sentences he wants.
> Users can decide for themselves if they trust a sentence or not
> by looking at who voted for the sentence to be correct
> and who voted for it to be incorrect.
At least 70% of ordinary Brazilians would defend that "Eu vi ele" is correct. It isn't. In fact, it is, by far, the most widely used pattern in everyday language. And these people could even criticize me for defending such an old-fashioned pattern that only a few teachers use. Well, that has been done. That's why traditional grammar has been banned from many Brazilian universities, and a different approach has been taken.
I think we're running away from the main problem in this site: people want to write sentences in languages other than their own, and have them checked by native speakers. That's not selfish. Well, sometimes it is, but sometimes they're just trying to make their sentences more available to the rest of the world. Who, apart from Amastan, would be able to translate all those Amazigh sentences into English, or Portuguese, or Spanish? Is the effort of having 100% natural-sounding sentences really more valuable than having pairs of sentences that would never exist otherwise? Besides, these translations could be checked and corrected by native speakers once they are submitted in a secondary section of the site. I'd invite you to read the suggestions I wrote in that thread. Vortarulo's suggestions are perhaps better than mine and even easier to implement.
I know it would take time and effort, but well, ain't it worth it?
Well, there's a reason why I said it's still a long way to go, and that it would be too long to explain everything. What I've written to answer to Pfirsichbaeumchen is only the tip of the iceberg. There would really be a lot lot lot more to explain, but what I've written can be a start, for those who are curious, to try and figure out where Tatoeba could be going and how this could work.
I did read the suggestion you had written back then, don't worry. I read most of the messages on the Wall.
I don't think the suggestion will fully answer the problem though. The fact that people want to write sentences in languages other than their own is not exactly the main problem. It's a problem, yes, but by solving it you will uncover bigger problems, which are: what is a correct and natural sentence, and what is a language? Those are the real problems.
Someday I will need to write a more thorough blog article about all of this. But until I have the time and energy to do that, you'll have to patiently follow the evolution of Tatoeba to discover what I really have in mind :)
So, do I have to fear that one day, however distant, the sentences I contributed will have my name erased from them and become some kind of common property?
C'est ce que je comprends, et je déteste cette impression qu'on change les règles d'une construction collective, dans laquelle certains contributeurs se sont beaucoup investis, et ce, sans leur demander leur avis ou sans en tenir compte.
No, your don't have to fear that your name will be erased. We will always keep track of who added which sentence, and when it was added. People will always be able to see what you have contributed, and how much you have contributed.
The fact that I've said "sentences shouldn't belong to anyone" doesn't mean at all that "every contribution becomes anonymous".
Note that your sentences are already a common property in the sense that everything you contribute to Tatoeba becomes a knowledge that is made available for everyone, and that is reusable in other projects. It's not something that is kept in a private corpus that only you can access, or only people that you have authorized.
Silja,
Thanks for your message,
>>>> If you are not 100 % sure that the sentence you are going to contribute is correct and natural, don't submit it.
I have a mother language, and sometimes even in that mother language I'm not 100% sure that such or such sentence is correct. That's why people from my own language community (I wish there were many more on this website, though) would comment and discuss some aspects and errors I may have made in such sentences. That's the same thing with most other users. In addition to that, I don't think that we can make Tatoeba a website in which people would contribute only in their native tongues. This concept is already questioned and it should be, indeed. All around me, I see Argentinians contributing sentences in Finnish, Germans contributing in English and Russians in Arabic. So why wouldn't a Turkish contribute in Spanish and an African in English?
As for the Google problem, I think it's their problem, not Tatoeba's community. I'm a professional translator and I use websites and other stuff that use corpora that are much better than those Google relies on (translated by professionals), yet, they still contain errors. Google's programmers should learn with time what to pick and what to ignore for their "sophisticated" stuff, and I'm confident they'll do it some day. As for Tatoeba's community, I think that they should neither worry about Mr. multibillion dollar Google nor should they worry about private projects developed by other people for their own interest. This is my humble opinion, though.
Cheers
+1
Silja (2nd reply),
>>>> If you really need to contribute in a foreign language, please verify the correctness of your sentences from reliable source (eg. a native speaker) BEFORE submiting them to Tatoeba.
That's what I'm already doing with a British penfriend and personal friend who lives in my country. The problem is that it sometimes takes time. I also appreciate the help and encouragement of some native English speakers and non-native speakers from various other countries.
We've had similar discussions before. My solution, though with some modifications, still resides in the ideas expressed in this post (from January, 2013). It's worth reading, I think.
http://tatoeba.org/pt_BR/wall/show_message/15321
Alex:
>>>>> 2) only interested members would have to go through non-native sentences to help other users by checking them; 3) we would attract more users, because many people are looking for that resource; 4) we would have more sentences, since more users would try to write sentences in foreign languages; 5) Tatoeba would be more useful and unique.
+ 1000
In my opinion, people are free to write and speak any language they want. If they're "too poor", they'll improve, there will be people who would help them and the last thing they need is people who are willing to block them or put them down. Alex's solution is perfect for that.
That is an awesome idea and I can but wonder why it has never been implemented. With that, Tatoeba would easily become twice as interesting and useful.