La traduction exacte serait plus "Il ne restait pas plus de 20 personnes dans le village"

"restaient"

@muriel, non c'est "restait" , tout comme on dit "il y a 20 personnes" :)

ah, merci sysko =)! ouais, c logique vu que c'est il est pas ils^^.

mais c'est muiriel et pas muriel ;)

Barbiche0 > La traduction exacte serait plus "Il ne restait pas plus de 20 personnes dans le village"

Non, pour moi la traduction est bonne.
Il me semble bien que ...しか...ない se traduit pas ne...que...
- pas plus de 20 personnes = 20 ou moins
- ２０人しかない = 20 personnes mais pas plus = que 20 personnes

Mais, je demanderai confirmation à ma prof.

I think that some confusion here arises because
it's hard for us to know exactly _what_ we are translating.

In this case, the sentence with the lowest id number was the English one.
But the Japanese sentence:
村には２０人しか残っていなかった。
does not accurately express the idea in the English sentence
of "no more than" (= up to 20, and including 20).
It's closer to "only 20 people".

@superbolo:
Si vous voulez traduire #139248, je suis d'accord.
Mais si vous voulez traduire #45572,
je suis d'avis que vous avez tort,
et que Barbiche0 a raison.
(Excusez-moi s'il vous plaît pour mes fautes en français).

I see.
According to my memory, in 2008 we used to take the japanese sentence as the original (I still always do so).
And, one sentence and its translations had the same ID. So, lower ID doesn't mean original sentence.
Yes, I translated #139248.

(pas de problème, pas de fautes en français)

As Trang used to said in an other comment, the one and ONLY sentence to take in account is the first one, which is bigger than the others. others are just diret translations of this main sentence, and those in gray are translations of translations of this sentences, this explain why there's sometimes difference, as all language are vague and precise on not the same points

so what to do

for example : I'm french and only able to understand english and i'm facing and sentence like this


Japanese
-> german
->(gray) english

there translating directly would be a mistake as the reference sentence is the Japanese one (whenever each ones was added)
if i want to translate the english one, I just click on the english one to set it as reference one and then translate it in french

we know it's something really intuitive yet and natural, but we will try to implement mechanism to make it clear :)

@superbolo in fact i don't about 2008, but now each sentence as one ID, and yep the lower id means anything, as it's just the id given by the database

as explained the reference sentence is the one appearing first, others should not be take in account while translating

I know that mechanism.
The problem in this sentence is if you click on jp, en, or fr sentences, the two others appear in bright green (check it, you will see...).
It seems there is a triple reference. Maybe, because it's an old sentence. I think I don't have this problem on my more recent contributions.
I wish the french sentence would be linked to only one sentence (japanese prefered).

because the french has been take in reference for three translation that's all :)
that happen often, especially for english sentence

I explain

English sentence A

I translate it in french now on the page referene of sentence as we have

English A
->French B

now someone translate again the sentence A in chinese , on the page reference of sentence A we have


English A
->French B
->Chinese C

and if you click on the chinese one you will have this


Chinese C
-> Engish A
->(gray) French B

as french is not linked to Chinese

is that clearer that way ?

so if a sentence is correct itself (no grammar errors, sounds natural) but is not a good translation what to do ?

case 1 : the sentence is ONLY link to one sentence
just try to make as close as possible to the othe sentence

case 2 (most common) : the sentence is already link to other sentenc

just don't touch it, because as you've alreadt experienced try to correct it will be a mess as people will maybe need to chance all the sentence linked to it , and sentence linked to this sentence etc.. etc...
so don't worry for the moment, if you're agree on a new correct french translation, just add it as a new translation of the japanese one, that way when unlink will be possible, we will just unlink this sentence from the japanese one

is it okay that ? :)

Hey all, that's why i thought it was a mistake : The french sentence was a mistaken translation of the english one... But if the japanese has a slightly different meaning... The english translation may be right !

I didn't noticed it was directly linked to the japanese model actually... My bad !

I can see now that, in the future,
I will have to be much more careful
about paying attention to the color of the arrows,
whether green or grey.

It's very difficult when we have this situation:

language X, sentence A => language Y, sentence B
language Y, sentence B => language X, sentence C

and one of the translations is wrong.

If I'm looking at sentence B, then I can see both A and C in green,
but they disagree, so it feels very confusing.

I guess we just have to wait for unlink.

This project is evolving.