Yes. Especially because there are going to be lots, lots more...

(Croatian as well, please)

We'll be processing sentences to automatically add missing periods, capital letters and fix other typography issues. Sacredceltic had actually brought this up already.

But it's true we can add a note about punctuation and capital letters. I'll append it to the red warning message below the translation form.

It sounds like a good idea to me.

> (sentences with the native-check tag should probably be orphaned so that a sufficiently proficient speaker can adopt them)

I disagree on this point. There's a reason why it's "Needs Native Check" (rather than "Needs Native Parent"). The creator of the phrase should keep the phrase, and there's no more work in checking than in parenting (in fact, parenting would involve the check anyway).

> So far, I've not figured out how to remove a tag from a
> sentence

If you are not a moderator, you can only remove tags that you have added. You can't remove others' people tags.


> Now that we have a bit of experience with these, it might
> be a good idea to figure out where we want to take them
> and how to structure them for that purpose.

Thanks for taking the time ^^ CK had also tried to sort the tags: http://a4esl.com/temporary/tatoeba/
(cf. "Some of the Tags That I've Found")


> 1) There seem to be a number of empty and duplicate tags.
> Can Trang or Sysko easily delete these?

Yes.


> 4) Tag language and script. [...] I think we should
> translate/transliterate the non-English ones and stick
> with that until we can translate tags.

It's not always easy to translate, and sometimes a non-English tag may be more appropriate/accurate. For instance if you tag a French sentence with "preterite", it can be ambiguous whether "preterite" refers to the "passé simple" or to the "imparfait". So if you're going to put a tag that refers to a tense, it's probably better to use the name in the language of the sentence. That's one case I can think of but there are probably other cases...

I still agree though, that we should use English tags by default, until we can translate tags.


> 5) Is there a way to add a field on the tags in the
> database to categorise them?

At the moment, no.


> 6) We might want to consider tossing out some of the
> tags. 'Fruit' may be fine, but 'apples' just seems a bit
> useless given the search feature.

I agree.


> Finally, I think the tags can be a fantastic tool, but so
> far they seem a bit disorganised and unwieldy to be used
> on a mass scale.

I agree. We do have more plans for tags, but they're not a priority yet...


> Some statistics on how many sentences are tagged and how
> many sentences each tag has would be very interesting to > gauge how people are using them.

Actually if you want to do some stats, you can use this file (it's not part of the official downloads files yet):
http://tatoeba.org/files/downloads/tags.csv

The fields are: sentence_id, tag_name

It's exported every week.

Some more thought about tags.

BTW, IMHO tags should be as general as possible: not “2nd Person Formal”, but “2nd Person”, “Formal”. This makes them more useful for automated processing.

> So far, I've not figured out how to remove a tag from a sentence

First step - become a moderator.

> So far, I've not figured out how to remove a tag from a sentence

The alghoritm is:
a) add the same tag to any other sentence (temporarily)
b) copy the delete link and replace the sentence number
c) delete your temporary tag

This is a bug. Use only when you’re absolutely sure it’s applicable.

Click on the English flag on the top right corner of the main page. This will give you ALL the English sentences available. Then on the right side you'll see options to narrow down the list. You want to choose the one "Show Sentences Not Directly Translated Into...", and then "Russian". Voilà.

As a side note, you should probably select "Show Translations in...", then "All Languages". Sometimes, there's already a good English-to-Russian translation, but it just hasn't been linked. For efficiency reasons, it might be better to just request that someone with the power to link link the two.

It's easy, but I'm too lazy to do this. ^^ I've started working on Uzbek, maybe I'll finish it someday...

Also, sysko has to do transliteration caching. It will allow making transliteration more time-intensive (dictionary searches...).

> one-to-one letter correspondence between
> the alternative alphabets exists (e.g. Serbian).
But injekcija = инјекциjа, not ињекциjа. So you need a dictionary when transcribing from Latin...

> Uighur
Latin > Arabic is the easiest (unless people omit ' and don't differenciate j/zh ^^).
Since we have no Latin Uyghur sentences, there is no rush.

Others require a LARGE dictionary of proper names, since Arabic has no capital letters. Cyrillic requires a dictionary of Russian loanwords.

> and - I think, but Demetrius could confirm - Tatar
No, this one is tricky in both directions. The hardest part is q and ğ. Usually к = k and г = g w/ front vowels, к = q and г = q with back ones.

But Arabic words break vowel harmony:
нигъмәт — niğmət ‘dish’ (ğ is marked as гъ), сәгать — səğət ‘clock’ (ğ is marked by changing vowel letter, the vowel quality is marked by the soft sign), сәгатем — səğətem ‘my clock’ (ğ is marked by a vowel letter w/out a soft sign)

Russian loanwords break vowel harmony in other way, they force the K and G even near back vowels.

Also, there are W and V:
В = V (вагон — vagon ‘carriage’), W (авыл — awıl ‘village’)
У = U (су — su ‘water’), W (тау = taw ‘mountain’)
Ү = Ü (күрү — kürü ‘see’), W (Мəскəү — Məskəw ‘Moscow’)

for some Demetrius started to work on them, you can see with him what he already done, what is hardly doable etc.
For the other one, either give me a letter to letter/ word to word transliteration file (like origin[tab]transliterate) and I think it will not take me long to integrate it in tatoeba.

You can get orphan sentences by setting "translated into none" :)
For the "several random sentences" page, I will get it back soon, but for the moment this page is slow as hell and was really internally bad designed, but I figured to make it fast so it will soon be as before.

The page which show all the sentences in a language show newest, because this way it favourites collaboration, I add a sentence, it will get more chance to be translated than old one because it will appear on first page for a while (depending of this language activity, not sure "a while" will be very long for Russian or Esperanto :p). But you can go to the oldest one by going clicking on "last" :p (more seriously, yep we can add a revert order button)

Not in this case - because the only difference is whether one word is in hiragana or in kanji.