I don't see anyone with that username, but it's worth looking at a user's most recent activity (which you can find via their profile) to see whether they're still active. If they're not, there's no point in waiting very long.

Are there any specific questions you're thinking about?

Thanks for doing this. Several comments/questions:

(1) Is there some term you can use other than "original"? Maybe "novel"? The Tatoeba interface already uses the term "original" to mean simply "not from translation", rather than "using a novel combination of words".

(2) On my phone, all but the last two columns of the chart disappear once the page is finished rendering. On my laptop, they remain in place.

(3) I would be interested in a contributor's percentage of novel sentences in a given language, as measured against all their sentences in that language.

The process to request a language is described in our wiki:
https://en.wiki.tatoeba.org/art...nguage-request

I have also replied to your email :)

Voitko antaa esimerkin tai muutaman siitä, mitä tarkoitat? Lauseisiin ei kuulu laittaa ylimääräisiä merkintöjä sukupuolesta, mutta jos kielen kielioppi täsmentää sukupuolen, sitten se tekee niin. Kommenteilla tai tunnisteilla voi ilmaista lisätietoa.

In the case of Russian or other Slavic languages, it's obvious, so tagging them is unnecessary in my opinion. Of course, if you wish to do so, you can.

I fixed it.

I see that there are 133 Hungarian sentences with a "@change" tag. Some of them have a comment such as this, which is easy to understand for someone who doesn't speak Hungarian:

@change
emlékszek —> emlékszem

Can I assume that such sentences can be changed with no more discussion, especially if the comments were written over two weeks ago?

Why don't you apply to be a corpus maintainer?

Vielen Dank! Merci beaucoup, Christian ! 😊

¡Feliz cumpleaños, Lisa! ¡Que te la pases bien!

Feliz aniversário, Lisa!!! Parabéns!!

As we say in Yiddish, biz hundert un tsvantsik!

生日快乐，丽莎！生日快洛！Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Geburtstag!

Thanks

When translating from Spanish to English, I get plenty of ambiguous sentences where I could either translate with a he/him subject or a she/her subject
In keeping with CK’s practice of using Tom, a male character, by default, and later merely by my own convenience, I translated these ambiguous sentences only with a he/him version unless it makes sense to do otherwise, although both sentences would be correct translations.

I’m not particularly bothered by near-duplicate sentences honestly. If it’s done maliciously, that’s annoying, but if it’s unintentional or serves an actual purpose, that’s fine for me.

Also, something I want to mention

The argument that near-duplicates showing different grammatical constructs of the same message (ie. She instead of He) are unnecessary because students will already know enough to convert for themselves, is a narrow-minded perspective in my opinion, because this is catering to a very specific audience to whom this is referring to. That specific audience will be able to use the sentences so, but what about all the other users that aren’t in the same class?
I know this system isn’t really hard to adjust to by many means, I just don’t see the need to cater your activity on this project only to the standards of a sub-project, and constantly encourage/suggest that others follow the same standards of this sub-project.

Edit: change of wording

As long as they're really used and they sound natural, I would even encourage them. In some languages the sentence structure is very free or depending on the word order the stress can be put in one word or another, and I consider showing that important for the learners. The same goes for the fact that "you" as subject has at least 6 possible translations in Spanish, so why choosing one and not the other when all would be used differently depending on the context or the user?
I rarely add near-duplicates myself because it's a lot of work to add all possible alternatives but I don't see the problem with them.

I found near-duplicate sentences rather useful for beginners, and would like to see more of them, especially with different country/city names.

Now I'm making audiofiles based on Tatoeba's sentences, and hearing "Tom" and "Mary" here and there is quite annoying, so I need a program solution to replace them with random names. Fortunately, in German it's trivial (from grammar point of view), but if names have inclination in a particular language it's more tricky to do.

In the other hand I understand that near duplicates could be annoying for advanced learners, so they must have a possibility to skip those sentences while searching.

There are many kinds of near-duplicate sentences, and their generation, particularly on an industrial scale, greatly reduces the usefulness of the Tatoeba Corpus. There's nothing wrong with creating some near-duplicates. There are many problems caused by generating duplicates at every possible opportunity. They cause issues both here and with the people who use our corpus downstream, who need to work harder to find interesting sentences that are not just near-clones of other sentences, that have unique features of their own.

Near-duplicates:
- are boring
- make it harder to find and link indirect translations, since direct translations are scattered over a greater number of individual nearly identical sentences
- serve to encourage the generation of more near-duplicates, exacerbating whatever problems they cause
- tend not to produce interesting, illuminating links between words in the same sentence, since such sentences cannot be written via mass assembly

And I disagree with the idea that there is anything English-centric about labeling these near-duplicates a problem. They're a problem in every language.

Just to make sure we're talking about a variety of kinds of near-duplicates, I've seen the following:

- near-synonyms: "everybody/everyone", "anybody/anyone"
- pairs where "that" is present in one, but absent in the other ("I know you're mad", "I know that you're mad")
- expansion across person and number "They see me", "They see you", "They see him", "They see her"
- replacement of place names in otherwise identical sentences ("We went to Boston", "We went to Paris")
- sentences of the form "Tom is <adjective>", which tell the reader nothing about the adjective

The whole thing about Tatoeba is that it is not a textbook, where there's a purpose to showing, say, the full range of pronouns, or the full range of past-tense forms, on a single page, in a single chart. It's a way to find out how language is used, in all its richness. There are plenty of other places where one can find conjugation paradigms. And those are better places for people to go if they want to learn them. We should focus on providing an interesting, varied collection of sentences.

Most likely, near-duplicate sentences are short sentences. (John is a person. Fatima is a person. Jean-Francois is a person.) The question is: Do we still need dozens of short sentences? Yes. We can more easily add five billion sentences in this way; the Tatoeba-Corpus, English-Corpus etc. will be fu*king big.
No. Thousands of those sentences are boring and in fact useless.
Now, I find three sentences among hundred worth to translate. Nonetheless, it takes too much time to find them.

There are plenty of languages where the "trivial" change from he to she (or it!) causes many important grammatical changes in a sentence and practicing all of these is vital to learning a language correctly.

Many people understand that in the Latin languages adjectives and some past participles must match the gender (and number) of the subject.

How many know that in Welsh the mutation applied to the possession depends on the gender of the owner? These so-called trivial changes are very important and need to be practiced.

Dw i'n gweld ei gath - I see his cat
Dw i'n gweld ei chath - I see her cat

A trivial change in English, but not in Welsh.

I don't speak any Slavic languages, but I have been told that there are more than three genders and that these affect more than adjectives, so again the opportunity to practice is necessary.

Hi,

I'm with Shishir and Saidez on this one. "Near-identical translations are welcome but not welcome if there is a lot" doesn't really sit with the message that members first see: namely that you can add as many translations as you feel like.
Mind you: I personally wouldn't even bother copy-pasting over dozens or even hundreds of sentences, however, I don't agree with the sole idea that correct sentences can make a corpus worse. If there is an issue with those sentences, it's solely a technical issue! We have labelling, we have the count of direct and indirect translations, we have the history of the sentences. Once one has a simple way to organize sentences, they simply cannot make anything worse.
Keep in mind that there are very different kind of users on Tatoeba. I came from Clozemaster (probably not the only one) and I know someone who started to use the corpus for building a similar app (mostly for personal use). Of course they are facing issues (e.g because of multi-language sentences and niche stuff like that) but that's their issue to deal with. The good thing about Tatoeba is providing the framework and giving the opportunity to sort out what one possibly doesn't need, not policing the content for some preset goal.

Also, I feel that as much as it is good to have a summary of thoughts here on the forum, we could make use of the new Discord server in these scenarios, to facilitate understanding each other - so that less posts go back and forth that only makes this wall harder to read. Here is the invite link again: https://discord.gg/y3QwKdZ3PV

I am a bit late to the party but I’d like to add something.

I can think of two ways near-duplicate sentences are getting into my way when I use the search.

1. I am looking for various uses and contexts for a given keyword, but results are cluttered with near-duplicates, so I need to scroll and click "next page" until I find a more different sentence. Note that the default sort order "Relevance" makes it all the more likely that near-duplicate are going to follow one another. As an experienced user, I know that I can use the "Random" sort order to get around that problem, but I really don’t this it’s obvious for newcomers.

2. To make matters worse, sentences showing in the results will likely have near-duplicates appearing as indirect translations too, which is duplicating information all over. For example, given near-duplicate sentences A, B and C, all translations of X, showing in the results, we see:

- A
Translations
-- X
Translations of translations
-- B
-- C

- B
Translations
-- X
Translations of translations
-- A
-- C

- C
Translations
-- X
Translations of translations
-- A
-- B

The problem is that we are seeing A, B and C three times each. The information is duplicated all around, it feels messy and overloaded.

I don’t think near-duplicates are a problem per se, but the way we display search results sometimes makes me feel that they are getting in my way. But I think it’s just a matter of information display. If we had a way to automatically cluster near-duplicates (maybe with some AI), maybe we could somehow display them as groups, so that you can either browse into them or filter them out depending on your use case.

If I write a sentence "Szeret zenét hallgatni" (S(he) loves hearing music) and if I translate it, I take either "he" or "she". However, I don't find them useful near-duplicate sentences. After two weeks of English or Hungarian learning people know ő= he/she. The same reffers to e.g. the English "you". But these translations don't bother me, well, we don't always need to add those version. But I often miss other potential translation – not only with the most usual words.
What I find annoying are e.g. the following samples:
The capital city of Australia/Canada/Belgium... is Canberra/Otawa/Bruselles... These are not about language and grammar but geography.
Tom/Sami/Yanni is a [profession]. These and the tons of similar sentences are so simply that they make a great junk in the corpus.
All sentences with three words are near duplicate ones for me.