Ymmärtääkseni Horus ei tee uusia linkkejä, mutta siirtää kaikki yhdistettävien lauseiden linkit. Jos sen takia syntyy vääriä linkkejä, sen pitäisi johtua siitä, että joku muu oli linkittänyt yhdistettäviä lauseita väärin, ei niinkään Horuksen toiminnasta.

Since this is specifically about a given sentence, I think you should leave the comment on the sentence itself, instead of on the Wall.

[#2794282] Nu e niciodată prea târziu pentru a învăța. (carlosalberto)

Sounds a proverb. Proverbs do not need to be exact translations of each other.

I would like to add one question: there are languages that are very close to each other, for example, I've never studied Ladino or Asturiano but I can understand >90% of the sentences in these languages because they're very close to Spanish. Would they count as languages I don't know at all or would it be OK to link them? (I generally only link between the sentences indicated in my profile and Spanish but sometimes I'm tempted to link sentences in these two languages with their translations in more studied languages so that they get more visibility).

Jossain vaiheessa katsoin erinäisten kielten lukusanoja ja linkitin yhdestä (tai nollasta) kymmeneen laskevia lauseita toisiinsa. Vaikutti melko turvalliselta asialta tehdä ja olin varovainen esimerkiksi yksi-sanojen sukujen kanssa.

Tämä oli helpompaa, koska pystyin linkittämään kieliä, joita minun profiilissani ei ollut. Toisaalta ei tämä myöskään tuonut merkittävää lisäarvoa korpukseen, epäilen, eikä tämän kieltäminen olisi suuri menetys.

Anyway, until we figure out what to do here, I would kindly ask everyone to avoid linking to languages they don’t know at all

= Mindenesetre, amíg nem találjuk ki, hogy mi legyen itt, addig mindenkit arra kérnék, hogy kerülje a linkelést olyan nyelvekre, amelyeket egyáltalán nem ismer

Horus also linked sentences incorrectly.

I don't know... maybe we have that list already. called favorites.

It's kinda objective what makes an interesting sentence, so making an algorithm for that is hard
Tatominer tries to do something similar, going through words that don't have translations or example sentences

> boring sentences are easier to translate

I don't think this is necessarily true.

If you focus on the frequency of individual words, it does seem like it would have to be the case: more common words are likely both boring and easy to translate, while less common words might be interesting, but also harder to translate.

But sentences are not just individual words, but like bags of them, and you can mix and match the contents to balance difficulty and interestingness, e.g. by using mostly common words to keep the sentence easy to translate and then spicing it up with one slightly rarer word to make it more interesting.

My current setup for artisanal mass production of (hopefully) interesting sentences involves a tatominer-style list of not-too-common words which I take inspiration from, plus a frequency-checking script to see whether I accidentally used any even rarer words, and a length limit to prevent me from going full 18th-century novelist with run-on sentences that are so long your eyeballs faint from exhaustion without making it even half the way to the verb at the end of the sentence. I use that to try out a few candidate sentences, and then I add the one I like best.

I'm not sure whether that actually makes me better at writing sentences that are neither too boring nor too hard to translate, because before I adopted this process, my original sentences were mostly only translated by maaster, and after I adopted this process (like, last week, which is why I'm so eager to talk about it) my original sentences are still mostly only getting translated by maaster. Well, at least I myself am not bored.

As you can tell, I was mostly focusing on creating new sentences. But you're right that adding more translations to already translated sentences has additional benefits due to the indirect translations. So trying to make interesting sentences more visible among the sentences we already have is definitely a good idea. I might put my frequency-based bag-of-words model to the task and see whether it comes up with anything... well, interesting.

Suosittelen kääntämään niitä lauseita, joita haluat muidenkin kääntävän, ja vastaavasti kirjoittamaan sellaisia lauseita joita haluat muiden kääntävän. Hankkeen luonteeseen kuuluu, että kaikki saavat kirjoittaa haluamiaan lauseita (tietyissä rajoissa). On hyödyllisempää keskittyä rohkaisemaan hyvän työn tekijöitä tai tarjoamaan heille työkaluja kuin paheksua niitä, joiden valintojen kanssa on eri mieltä.

Erityisesti kannattaa muistaa, että tietokantaa käytetään moniin eri tarkoituksiin. Erilaiset lauseet ovat hyödyllisiä eri tarkoituksissa. Joidenkin kielten kohdalla jokainen, jopa yksinkertaisin, lause on jo suuri saavutus, jos kieli on esimerkiksi erittäin vaarantunut. Myös aloitteleva kielenoppija voi hyötyä yksinkertaisista lauseista. Jos niitä tuntuu olevan liikaa, on tämä suodatuskysymys; tällöin kaivataan työkaluja käyttäjien suodattaa pois tietynlaisia lauseita.

https://tatoeba.org/en/sentences_lists/show/169859

This list contains last week's contributions. Was this list compiled automatically, instead of manually? If so, it should be possible to create a similar list containing all the sentences that need translation this week for Tatominer; and if that list is too short, maybe the number of words could be increased just to create a bigger list. Maybe the sentences in that list would be more interesting; although I guess Tatominer only works for some languages.

If you don't want to rely on Tatominer, you could get a list of the 20,000 most common words in the language you want to translate from (most adults know at least that many words in their native language) and pick words at random to translate sentences on Tatoeba, the advantage being that Tatoeba's search engine knows about declension and conjugation.

On the topic of sentences with lots of translations, I notice that the most active user on Tatoeba links his sentences to others written in languages that are not listed in his profile. I'm fairly sure he doesn't know all the languages he links to. He does this linking usually after he has added an additional English translation where an existing English translation is already linked to these languages. I suppose the reasoning is this: as the two English sentences have the same meaning, any sentences linked to the original English sentence must also be linked to his new sentence.

But if I'm right, and he can't read those languages, I wonder if it is really acceptable for him to link his sentences to them. The obvious problem with it is that he will reproduce errors in the corpus where existing sentences are linked incorrectly. I would also say that links between languages made by people who don't understand those languages are inherently untrustworthy, and don't serve the purpose of having an accurate corpus.

Does anyone else link their sentences to languages they can't read? Maybe many of you follow the reasoning above, and you do link in such cases. Maybe I'm just being naive again here.

The user in question is an admin, and he's been doing it for years, so you'd be forgiven for thinking that it's acceptable. If the general opinion here is that it's fine, and you all do it, I suppose I might start doing it, too.

Dictionary based compression algorithms like Lempel-Ziv basically already implement this in a way that's useable even for very large files. I guess you'd just take some FOSS code or implement the dictionary generation algorithm, then stop and count the dictionary size instead of compressing. Sounds kinda fun, I've never looked closely at how they work

Another member of Tatoeba (lbdx) has done some similar work :)

https://github.com/Tatoeba/tatoeba2/issues/2816

We already had an argument about this a couple months ago, and I don't know if there was a choice of taking an official stance on the invasion or not

I know the argument was about replacing the Russian flag with another symbol (an alternative Russian flag that didn't reflect the government), and Trang opted not to because of the linguistic need of having a recognizable symbol for the language (the Russian flag), and suggested waiting a few years to see if Russians would recognize it as a symbol

Tatoeba is not a Ukrainian or Russian project and barely targets politics. Frankly, I'm glad it's like this. I'm glad that I don't feel forced into statements just because I find this project a valuable opportunity to share language content.

Also, I don't think Tatoeba as a community effort should even take responsibility for possible world views of people, as long as there is nothing illegal or threatening.

Thanks!

thanks

I grew up with American influenced Spanish, and when I joined here with my Spanish still questionable, I learned a more standard dialect to avoid being chastised for contributing incorrect sentences. I think that the Spanish I learned and that my family spoke/speak is just as valid a communication language as the Spanish taught in schools.

I’m in a slightly similar situation with English where I’m still refining my skills and have some details in my speech that set me apart from speakers of standard English. Maybe it doesn’t follow all conventions, but it gets the job done.

In fact, almost everyone speaks a dialect. Only few people who was specially trained speak a "standard language". Regional languages are usually spoken by native ethnic groups. At least, that's what I know from my experience.

Dialects and general traditions like that are great, but Tatoeba is obviously more useful to most people when it's standard language. I'd actually like it if there was a way to subgroup languages on here, but people kinda do that with tags already

Standard language is also called a standard dialect.
I've added some sentences using dialects, but I mainly use standard language, partly because I'm in the part of the country where the standard dialect originates from and mainly because it can be understood everywhere clearly.

Murteilla ja puhekielellä kirjoitetut lauseet ovat yhtä tärkeitä, ja kenties tärkeämpiäkin, kuin kirjakieliset lauseet. Virallista, standardoitua kieltä löytää monesta paikasta, kun taas murteiden oppiminen on hankalampaa.

Kirjoitan silti pääosin kirjakielisiä lauseita, mutta teen joskus poikkeuksia. Mutta suuremman ja paremmin edustetun kielen tapauksessa erilaisten rekisterien rikkaus olisi todella rikkautta.

Re: dialects

Virtually no Indonesians speak the formal Bahasa Indonesia, unless it's the news or we are deliberately talking to foreigners. Every day, our speech is mixed with the regional languages. I don't think these are dialects but rather code-mixes. Of course I think all of them are valid and it's fun listening to my friends from the other side of the country speaking with their own mixed features, but those are not suitable for a corpus, at least in the context of national standard language purposes.

In Tatoeba, almost all the sentences I make are in the standard language, though there are a couple sentences with *nation-wide* colloquialisms here and there (should probably be tagged haha). I avoid code-mixed sentences.

Re: regional languages

I speak Javanese and "acquired" a bit of Banjarese living in its area for two years. Like any languages, both of them have many dialects and some "main" prestigious dialects. In Tatoeba, I usually use dialect-neutral words, but sometimes I do write a dialectal sentence.

The thing about languages in Indonesia is that the writing/spelling systems are not standardized (or even if it is, common people don't know about that), leading to a chaos of uneducated Indonesianized spelling that aren't even faithful to the languages' morphophonology at times.

This, and to add with the lack of interest in regional language education, the mindset of "regional language = ethnocentrism!1! Use Indonesian instead!1!1!", and the official use of regional languages only as a "symbol" without usage campaigns, makes a lot of the languages here in danger.

Luckily there have been increasing interest in language preservation over the years and although we need big changes to show significant progress, small steps are also important, which is my reason to write Javanese (+Javanese script) and Banjarese sentences here too.

tl;dr I'd do my best to help saving regional languages because they are cool

Thank you all for your answers. :)