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sacredceltic sacredceltic November 8, 2010 November 8, 2010 at 2:39:39 PM UTC link Permalink

I leave Tatoeba because I think there is a problem of authority and independence of its moderation that puts into question the legitimacy of its content.
From the admission of her founder and administrator, Trang herself, a system enabling to judge whether a sentence is valid is not in place to this day. Yet, under the pretext of openness to the language "as it is spoken at present", Tatoeba doesn't acknowledge any kind of authority from the traditional institutions and from the experts of languages (encyclopedias, dictionaries and academical institutions, recognised by other institutions that traditionally deal with languages.)
The appreciation is subsequently left to a group of moderators having an average age of 20-25 on Tatoeba and who acknowledge solely Internet "usage" as an authority, most of the time through raw statistical analyses of usage as found on the web (essentially Google raw results) that include spelling and typographical mistakes, that sometimes outnumber correct spellings, as well as Wikitionary, which is a free online dictionary, working on the same model as Tatoeba, without the sanction of any legitimate language authority, and which is in the hands of a handful anti-experts militants.
I have nothing against youth and its admirable enthusiasm, but the problem is that age plays a very front role in the appreciation and the perception of a language. Furthermore, each generation possesses its own register of vocabulary and verbal forms. In the absence of a generation-balanced moderation, the Corpus cannot be representative of the sentences used by the population of the speakers of these languages.

Besides, all moderators at Tatoeba are anglophones, which is to say absolutely no room is allowed to the non-anglophone polyglots in the moderation of Tatoeba, although they constitute the vast majority of polyglots on the planet.
In France, for example, only 30% of students study English, while 70% choose to study other languages. And among these 30% who study it, only a small fraction master it. This small fraction is most of the time an elite whose parents could afford for immersion trips to English-speaking countries. In return, this English-speaking micro-elite becomes the champion of anglophilia.
The anglophilia that results has an impact on the moderation as applied to the anglicisation of the Corpus of other languages, and, eventually, to the quality of the sentences themselves. That is without taking into account the social distortion that results from the fact that, then, only a privileged and anglophile social class is moderating the Corpus of other languages, to the detriment of the view on these languages by a majority of their non-anglophone speakers, otherwise absent or muted.
I thus consider that moderation on Tatoeba is not representative of the general population, nor is it of the population of Totoeba's users, among which many are not anglophones.
To make matters worse, the future system of assessment of the validity of sentences that is envisaged, according to Trang's own statement, would be based, to the detriment of expertise, on "the wisdom of the crowds"
(which would be to sentences the equivalent of what was to human life the answer given by the audience to the gladiator asking to kill his opponent, as was the practice in the arenas of ancient Rome. No, crowds are not wise as we all know very well!)
I oppose such a system that gives an edge only to the majority that can express themselves - in the moderation language - ie English, which subsequently finds itself to be the only possible absolute majority, at the same time among the users of an anglophone system, and moderated by anglophones and anglophiles, who thus favour in an exaggerated way, the validation of anglicisms in the Corpus of other languages that they thus alter.
Paradoxically, this same freedom allowed to "adapt' languages like French on Tatoeba, against the view of experts, is not applied to English on Tatoeba, as pernickety moderators enforce a strict control over it. There is therefore on Tatoeba a contradiction between the keeping of a rigorous "purity" of English, and a total laxity when it comes to other languages. Which is logicial since, once again, every moderator on Tatoeba is anglophone.
I have subsequently chosen not to participate anymore to works of which intent is commendable, but of which organisation is anarchical and unbalanced, and of which result would equate to the havoc of languages other than English, havoc that I have repeatedly witnessed through numerous debates on Tatoeba.

I thank the members who showed a professional and constructive attitude and I praise them for their work and patience. I hope we'll meet again.

I remain available to take part to a similar but equitable project, that is to say that respects balance between generations, between languages and their corollary, social classes, that is to say, eventually, to a project that represents the population of the speakers of the worlds' languages and that doesn't privilege a particular group to the detriment of others.

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ludoviko ludoviko November 8, 2010 November 8, 2010 at 9:15:51 PM UTC link Permalink

Rome was not built in one day.