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