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hi, I'm new at this, and I wonder if there's an easier way to do simple edits. In using wwwjdic, i spotted some obvious errors and Trang told me I could fix them, so I did. Just now I tried the "Contribute" link, then 15 random Japanese sentences. But how do I get back to the sentence page to see if others need to be fixed? Page back gave a lot of Resends.
Also, I'd really like to go through them systematically, say a 100 at a time, not random so I wouldn't redo stuff. I'm not talking rocket science - my Japanese isn't good enough for complicated stuff - just things like my last few, "grand mother" -> "grandmother" and "he seems to very happy" -> "he seems to be very happy". Not sure if these are that useful, but I'm a finicky type and would be glad to do them.
-Dave

Hi Dave,
I admit it's extremely annoying to do simple edits at the moment and believe me, if I had more time it would not be like that. It will be much easier someday, I cannot tell you when, but I can promise you it will be.
In the meantime, you can of course use WWWJDIC as you figured. But I want also want to point out that if you are using the "serial translators" page, the best way to proceed is to open a new tab whenever you adopt (that is, instead of left-clicking on the "adopt" icon, right-click on it and choose "open in a new tab"). This way you keep the list of sentences in one tab while editing the incorrect sentence in the other tab. And when you're done editing, you can just close the tab.
Also, don't be afraid to adopt as many sentences as possible, and remain their "owner". Of course it's better to understand the translations of the sentences you own, but it's NOT a requirement.
The thing is, by adopting a sentence, you will prevent others from changing them into something that might be incorrect. So you can also adopt sentences even if you're not going to edit them. I'd even encourage you to do that.
Ideally, each sentence should belong to someone. Even more ideally, each sentence should belong to someone who understands it perfectly and will respond quickly if there's a comment on their sentence.
And don't think that you're not helpful, all the corrections you are doing are actually very useful. Translating is not the only way to help in Tatoeba. We want to provide quality content but we know there are still many mistakes, and it's a huge task to correct them.

Hi Trang,
Thanks! I tried opening a new window and that helps, tho by now I'm in the habit of just left-clicking, so I'll have to unlearn it. I have to disagree in a good way with "extremely annoying" - this site is so addictive! It's fun. On the adoption point, I read a book a while back on the early wikipedia that tried to have people controlling subjects, and it was an enormous drag on the project and slowed everything down. So they opened it up and things took off. That's why I release all my sentences. I could be wrong. But you know, I feel that I may be correcting valid Briticisms, for example, so open may be best.
いつもありがとう。
Dave

Yes, I agree that if there is too much control, it slows everything down. It was actually what I experienced as well, back in the old version of Tatoeba where there were moderators and each contribution had to be validated by a moderator. I had written a little bit about that here : http://blog.tatoeba.org/2009/01...on-system.html
Anyway adoption was not intended to increase control, it was more intended to increase the involvment of contributors, as well as their responsibilities. And as stated in that blog post, it's also part of the validation process. The fact that a sentence belongs to someone doesn't mean it's error-free, but at least it indicates the sentence is less likely to have a mistake and you can trust it more.
But imagine: I want to translate English sentences into French, and I see this sentence which sounds strange to me, but I'm not sure if it's actually incorrect or if it's just that still lack of vocabulary. If I post a comment to ask about it, but there's no owner, the comment will just appear for a short time on the homepage and if no one answers quickly enough, it will basically go unseen. But if there's an owner, (s)he will receive a notification email and I will have more of a chance to get an answer to my question.
Also, if someone disagrees with your correction and post a comment on it, then you may learn something that maybe you wouldn't have seen if you weren't the owner of the sentence.
If you are correcting valid Briticisms, it doesn't really matter. If someone wants to have the British version back, instead of reverting your correction, they can just add it as a new sentence.
PS: Glad to know you're addicted :P

hmm, sorry, wasn't thinking - of course you can get many sentences compactly arranged by going directly to WWWJDIC.

Are the moderators planning to add sound support for sentences in the future? I am very curios. I don't think its necesarry, but it would definitely kick things up a notch!

it's planned (like a lots of things :D) but for the moment i can't give you a precise date, but yeah we will also really enjoy providing people the possibility to hear what they read. And we're eager to hear our dear contributors' voice.

that's so awesome! love this site.

curious*

Wow sounds great! This site is going to be a great hit! Keep up the good work!

Hi, I just spotted what I believe is an error with the katakana to romanji automatic traslator. チェ translates "CHIE" instead of "CHE". Hope it helps.
Cheers.

I was just wondering. The corpus is under CC:BY licence but when you're downloading the database dump, there is no way to re-associate a sentence with its original contributors.
Anyway, I guess it could be interesting to know who's contributing on which languages for collaborative translation research purposes.

Well, the fact that the corpus is under CC-BY means you have to mention Tatoeba if you are going to reuse it, not that we have to indicate the original contributor in the dump.
It works like this : people provide their work under CC-BY, so the attribution of the work of each user is mentioned in Tatoeba itself, through the logs. But then we're reusing the work of everyone to make something else: the corpus, which we also redistribute under CC-BY.
But now, if you also need to have the username of the original contributor, or any other information that is not provided by default, you can just ask and I'll see what I can do =)

Hey guys. Finnish in the house.
Love your interface by the way. Great job.

Hey, hey! I'm bourdu, collaborating with parent poster to have a finnish-french-english-japanese corpus. Keep up the good job!

Wow seems we have found the Batman and Robin of translations :D
Yep nice to find Finnish active again, it's been a long time without people contributing in this language, so congrats to have already added so many sentences and don't hesitate to report things you find strange / improvement or behaviour which bother you, we're eager to make Tatoeba a better place :)

Hi, new guy here,
Have you ever considered adding Brazilian Portuguese language?
Brazilians and Portuguese can understand each other pretty well, but the "natural" sounding totally difers between them.

Hi vbkun, and welcome :)
We haven't considered adding Brazilian Portuguese, for one thing : because no one requested it. But also, it's not exactly a new language.
I feel it is a problem similar to the distinction between British English and American English. Perhaps the difference is more significant in the case of Portuguese "Brazil vs. Portugal" though, but technically, it is still considered as the same language...
So right now, the best I solution I can suggest is to add a tag [Brazil] at the end of sentences that are in Brazilian Portuguese.

I also don't think it's really a big problem, I was mainlly just worried bout people learning the language VS natural sounding ;).
Because I guess in most cases (maybe 90% of them, or even a bit more) the sentences are understandable for both sides.
Guess I'll then add those tags in my future contributions for pt-br ;)

Coquille :
Il n'y a pas (encore) de résultats pour cette recheche mais vous pouvez nous aider à alimenter (...)
=>Il n'y a pas (encore) de résultats pour cette recheRche mais vous pouvez nous aider à alimenter (...)

Merci, c'est corrigé.

There are a number of sentences where some words are tagged with weird bracket syntax, like this one;
"There are days where I feel like my {brain}{1} wants to abandon me."
Do these have any meaning to the system, and should they be preserved when adding new translations?

No, you don't have to preserve them when adding new translations. They used to be used, and they may be used again someday, but right now they don't mean anything anymore to the system.
You can find a short explaination at the very bottom of this page:
http://tatoeba.org/eng/pages/do...mple-sentences

Then should they be removed?

They should, but not by you. I mean, someday I'll just run a script that will do the work, so don't worry about it :)
I'll also have to backup these sentences somewhere before removing the brackets, because they're still providing information that can be useful someday.

I see. It'd be so much simpler to run a script than to remove them one by one :)

Looks like there’s something wrong with the Chinese pinyin transliteration... the pinyin of some traditional Chinese characters are not properly displayed :S

True. We installed our own pinyin converter and started using it recently, but perhaps the data we used is not complete...
Anyway we switched to the old way so it is now working again for the traditional Chinese characters.

Hi, how about adding Latin as a separate language? It appears to be a core language for almost all of Europe's languages (from a cultural point of view, of course, not the linguistic one). Latin proverbs and sayings are actually original versions of correspondent idioms in many languages.

As for all other language, we're opened, we just need people adding some sample sentences in this language, as soon as you can provide us around 5 sentences, we can consider adding it.

Great, how about:
http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/349115
http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/349096
http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/349347
http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/349457
http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/349463
As for flag, consider 'SPQR' symbol :)

How about this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spqrstone.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spqr

Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking about! Now an icon of 20x30 pix :)

language added, the SPQR file human600 give dit not properly render on 20*30, so we've choosen something else, but if you have something better to propose us, tell us :)

Looks great! Thanks!