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Will the new design for the sentences eventually replace the old design for everyone, or will the old design be kept as an option, as it is now?
There will be a period of transition, but sooner or later we will get rid of the old design entirely.
Thanks for replying. Sad news, I guess.
Are you being melancholic?
You can put it like this, if you wish. The new design is terrible and clumsy to use. I'd hate to have it, but, obviously, we won't have a choice, which I accept.
Well, you could explain what is terrible and clumsy to use, and we could see how things can be improved, as a first step :)
1. By default, some translations are hidden in the new design and I need to click "Show N more translations" every time in my search results:
https://i.imgur.com/YyBRn8s.png
It is very annoying and very counterproductive. I do understand why someone might have this preference, but can we make it optional? Create another checkbox - "Expand all the translations". By default, if the user doesn't bother to change it, the sentences will be displayed as they're displayed now, but some of us can make it more comfortable for us.
I am aware you can permanently limit yourself to just a bunch of languages in your profile, and this issue will become less important, but I'm going to do it because I enjoy being able to see all the translations.
EDIT: I'm also aware of this setting:
"Display a link to expand/collapse translations when there are too many translations"
But it seems to be working for the old format only. I guess if you make it work for the new and the old format, that would resolve this problem.
2. The second thing that bothers me A LOT are the words "Translations" and "Translations of Translations":
https://i.imgur.com/rZCd1yi.png
I understand why they are there - a lot of users, especially the non-regulars or the relatively new contributors are confused by the whole idea of "gray" links and report the indirect translations as wrong while they're not wrong, they're just translations of translations and they don't have to match the "original" exactly. But for more experienced folks who understand and embrace the concept of indirect translations those words are just a nuisance, completely unnecessary information in words that can be perfectly color-coded. Could we optionally remove those words, leaving them there by default?
3. A less important issue - the new format is just less compact than the old one. Compare (this is the same sentence with the same translations):
https://i.imgur.com/4yuO9YJ.png
Thank you for your always useful feedback. :)
Well, I don't think there is so many terrible things there!
1. This setting needs improvement. Notice that the new design isn't complete yet so functionalities may be behave incorrectly or be missing. Even after the new design implementation, that might still be the case and we hope we can count on people's feedback to correct and improve them. As gillux mentioned, there will be a transition period, but the old design will only disappear when we will be absolutely sure that nothing's gone missing in the new design.
2. That's your personal opinion, so there isn't much to say. I can't say two. The first one is that of course, we can discuss that point. The second is that I'm not sure for how long you've been using the new design, but maybe after a while, you'll get used to it and those words won't bother you anymore. Once you're used to the new design, they might get easily ignored by your brain.
You also mentioned color-coded sentences. That's is also currently under discussion.
3. Yeah, I've noticed that too. Now, we need more scrolling. Not a really impacting issue, but it has been reported.
I hope I could answer your points clearly.
As a final, more general, note, change is always a difficult thing, and we expect a lot of complaints from a lot of people. However, if people could start by "here what I like and dislike now" before the "this crap is terrible", that would be appreciated and we would be able to discuss with a better set of mind. Thanks.
Hi Aiji,
I really hope you're not part of the development team, or at least not a decision maker of what will be implemented or not.
Your smug, dismissive and passive-aggressive way of dealing with our concerns is not ideal.
Your active-aggressive way of expressing your concerns wasn't ideal either.
Now, I hope I could give you an overview of what was currently being discussed on GitHub (mainly) and that a part of your concerns were already discussed or will be, and if my answer seemed too aggressive, I apologize. My thanks for your feedback were sincere, as I think you're one of those who very often gives precious information regarding how we could improve things.
How do I get specific languages to be above "show more"? Do I need now either to always click "show more" or to hide most of the languages completely?
You can deactivate this link in your settings: https://tatoeba.org/eng/user/settings
If you want it activated but would appreciate it to behave differently, please elaborate on what you would like to have and *why*.
From the same settings page, you can also choose a list of languages to only display sentences in those languages (all others will be hidden).
If I choose a list of languages, all other languages will be completely hidden. They won't be displayed if I click "show more". Here are my options if I don't hide languages completely:
Best option (not available) - show my preferred languages first; if there's a lot of translations, put everything else under "show more".
Worse (old design) - show everything; it's up to me to find sentences in my preferred languages among all others
Even worse (new design) - hide some translations no matter if they are in my preferred languages or not; I have to always click "show more" and then do everything I had to do in the previous option, so it's more work. Also, the list takes more space.
As noted above by deniko, it's impossible to disable "show more" in the new design. But even if it would have been possible, new design would still be worse for sentences with many translations.
> Best option (not available) - show my preferred languages first; if there's a lot of translations, put everything else under "show more".
That would actually be a cool solution. Thanks for this idea.
I would still prefer to be able to expand the sentences by default without clicking, but if you can actually list the languages that you want to be displayed first that would really be awesome. And would be cool if you can specify the order in which they're displayed.
For example, if I specify
eng,spa,fra,ita
In my profile, I would see the translations in those languages in that order, and only after those 4 languages I'd see all the other translations in their default (alphabetical, according to the language code) order.
The existing solution of completely hiding all the other languages is just not satisfying at all, at least for me.
I agree with Denis and Anton. The new design is extremely frustrating.
Is it for the same reasons as them or do you have other reasons?
The reasons are the same. They described them very well and I have nothing to add so far.
Then please see my reply to deniko below.
https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/sh...#message_34492
I have the same questions for you as I have for deniko.
Most importantly the last question:
> Could you provide a scenario of your activities in Tatoeba that can make
> us understand "Okay, indeed, if the translations were not expanded by
> default, it would be annoying"?
When I see a sentence in a foreign language I know, first of all I look whether it has already been translated into Russian or not.
If yes, I proofread the existing Russian translation(s) (not only for translation accuracy but also for punctuation, spelling and grammar). Sometimes I add my own translation(s) as well.
If not, I add one or several Russian translations.
If I see that my newly added sentences can be linked to the existing translations in the other foreign languages I know, I do it right away or later from this page:
https://tatoeba.org/rus/activit...ces_of/marafon
Besides that, I check the indirect Russian translations and link them to the main sentence if they match.
I also check the indirect translations in the other languages. Sometimes it helps me find some linking errors like this one:
https://tatoeba.org/rus/sentenc...omment-1165179
Just looking at the indirect link here:
https://tatoeba.org/rus/sentences/show/5918489
helped me find this error.
I'm also interested in some languages that are not listed in my profile. For instance, I enjoy seeing the Ukrainian, Czech or Italian translations.
It's just one of my activities in Tatoeba. I'm not sure I described it well enough but I hope it helps you understand why I find the new design and particularly the button "Show more" so frustrating.
I used to love the random sentence on the main page. But not anymore.
p.s.
> Now it works super weird - I add
> 3 Ukrainian translations out of habit, only to realize 20 seconds later
> it already had Ukrainian translations, they were just hidden.
That was my experience, too.
I created the following issue on GitHub:
https://github.com/Tatoeba/tatoeba2/issues/2210
If you were able to increase the limit of translations that you can see, what would be your limit? Would it be higher than 50?
On a side note, your description actually brings up other fundamental issues in the overall design of Tatoeba. It's a problem with the way Tatoeba is structured and organized. But addressing that problem is a whole other story so I won't delve into the details here.
50 would be enough, I think.
Btw, now I don't see the way to link the indirect translations to the main sentence. That's what I used to do all the time.
The linking feature has not been implemented yet in the new sentence design.
OK
And also the feature of reviewing?
Here an example:
https://tatoeba.org/epo/sentences/show/8604386
This sentence has been corrected, so my review has to be changed from red to green. For doing this I need to switch back to the old design, no?
Sorry if that has been answered before. I didn’t see it.
That will be implemented later :)
> Best option (not available) - show my preferred languages first;
A similar idea has been mentioned before:
https://github.com/Tatoeba/tato...ment-505311261
Additionally there has been some debate regarding the order in which translations should be displayed:
https://github.com/Tatoeba/tato...ment-577132284
> And would be cool if you can specify the order in which they're displayed.
That's also my opinion.
Based on the various discussions on GitHub, it became quite clear that we need to provide a better way for users to define the languages they want to see in Tatoeba and what is the priority of each language.
I'm still wondering however what is your use case for preferring to have all translations displayed by default. Do you confirm that it is because most of the time, the translations you are interested in are not displayed at the top? Or is there another reason?
Also, which of your activities does it affect the most? Is it slowing you down for translating sentences? For linking sentences? For proofreading? For something else?
Could you provide a scenario of your activities in Tatoeba that can make us understand "Okay, indeed, if the translations were not expanded by default, it would be annoying"? Right now I must say I can't imagine this scenario.
Joskus, yksinkertaisten lauseiden tapauksessa, löydän uusia kieliä joita voin linkittää. Esimerkiksi suomalais-ugrilaisten kielten numerot ovat hyvin samanlaisia, enkä tiennyt niistä kaikista ennen kuin selasin kielilistaa läpi sen lauseen kohdalla, joka listaa numerot ykkösestä kymmeneen.
Samoin olen joskus linkittänyt satunnaisen latinankielisen lauseen, vaikka en suuremmin latinaa osaakaan, jos olen sattunut tietämään mitä se tarkoittaa.
Usein selatessani Tatoebaa luen lauseita kielillä, joita en osaa tarkasti, saadakseni tuntumaa niihin ja kenties oppiakseni jotain. Tämä kattaa monet romaaniset ja germaaniset kielet, suomalais-ugrilaiset kielet ja latinan. En osaa kääntää näistä tai edes lukea näitä itsenäisesti ja näiden näkemin on huomattavasti vähemmän tärkeää kuin niiden kielten, joita osaan jonkin verran.
> Also, which of your activities does it affect the most? Is it slowing you down for translating sentences? For linking sentences? For proofreading? For something else?
Linking mostly, not proofreading.
When I link, just browse through Ukrainian sentence using the search feature to give me random sentences, and link them to all sentences they can be linked directly.
Also, when I stumble upon some interesting expression I really like searching for it here and check out translations to all languages I kind of understand, even those not listed in my profile just because I'm curious. I'd say that activity is very important for me.
Also, I used to enjoy having the random sentence on the main page. I don't know why, but I've always thought it to be a fascinating feature. I've stumbled upon some real gems there a few times, something I would have never found if I was trying to search for something. I would occasionally translate them. Now it works super weird - I add 3 Ukrainian translations out of habit, only to realize 20 seconds later it already had Ukrainian translations, they were just hidden. I turned on the random sentence because all this was very annoying.
So, in general, I understand why someone might prefer the new format, and I understand why you would prefer this to be the default format for the unregistered users and the default format for everyone else, but I kindly ask either to leave the old format for us, or at least add t those two features as optional features:
1. Expand them automatically, if my settings say so.
2. Remove the words "Translations" and "Translations of translations" as completely unnecessary and distracting (again, leave them there by default, but please allow us to get rid of them).
Everything else doesn't really bother me too much. Making the new format more compact or dense is nice, but not really a deal-breaker. Same about the feature mentioned by Anton - allow users to configure which translations to display first. That's a cool feature, I'd love to have it, but purely psychologically I feel like it's less important for me.
One thing to get a cool new feature - yeah, that's nice, but I understand why it's not there - another thing - taking a nicely functioning design and breaking it to something barely functional - that feels bad, like a giant step back.
Olen samaa mieltä kohdan 1 ja motivaation kanssa.
Kohta 2 olisi myös minulle parempi, mutta toisaalta ylimääräisten sanojen aiheuttama harmi on hyvin pientä, ja liika valinnaisuus käyttäjillä aiheuttaa kasvavaa työtaakkaa ohjelmoijille. Niinpä ehdotan, että vaikka tiiviimpi käyttöliittymä olisi mukavampi, ei ehdotus kaksi luultavasti ole pitemmässä juoksussa toteuttamisen arvoinen.
Thanks, Thanuir, you can be right about point 2, but I just feel they take space and they don't do anything useful for the experienced users. The direct and indirect links are already colorcoded by the color of the arrows (or > in the new design). It feels right to use words where they belong, for the important information - the sentences themselves - and icons and other mnemonics for technical information and actions.
All that feels consistent.
Now, using words to distinguish direct and indirect links just seems to be very inconsistent and it makes me uncomfortable. I will absolutely get used to the less compact design, but I just liked the consistency of everything else.
While this might be way less important for others, I still feel like it's something easy to implement and hopefully I won't be the only one who chooses to opt out from seeing the words "Translations" and "Translations of Translations".
I wonder whether I can join the development team just for this single task? I'm a software developer by profession, after all, although I do lack any web-development experience.
> I wonder whether I can join the development team just for this single
> task? I'm a software developer by profession, after all, although I do lack
> any web-development experience.
Tatoeba is open source. You (and anyone) can make a pull request on GitHub.
Please see our guide for people who want to contribute as developers:
https://github.com/Tatoeba/tato...as-a-developer
You can by the way use the Stylish add-on to make some readjustment of the UI to better suit your personal needs.
https://userstyles.org/
You would need to know CSS, but hiding certain elements or making the UI more compact would be totally possible with Stylish.
You can find various styles that people already created for Tatoeba in the Stylish website, by searching "tatoeba":
https://userstyles.org/styles/b...eba&type=false
> You can by the way use the Stylish add-on to make some readjustment of the UI to better suit your personal needs.
Thanks, that actually sounds cool. CK also mentioned Stylish to me today, so I guess I'll give it a whirl.
You may be interested to check the CSS code that I posted over here:
https://gist.github.com/trang/0...33407ccd794716
Related comment on GitHub:
https://github.com/Tatoeba/tato...ment-636214078
Just to be clear, I was not asking you those questions in defense for keeping the new design as it is. We will always try our best to provide the best possible user experience for everyone. But to do so, we need to understand how people use Tatoeba.
Users tend to go straight off saying "I would like things to be this way" or "Is is possible to implement this", but that is not helpful to us. We don't make changes just because someone prefers things to be a certain way.
Unless you are a trained UX/UI designer, you will not necessarily think of the best possible solution for a UI problem. You will suggest solutions based on your own habits and your own biases and the things you suggest may have a negative impacts on others without you realizing it.
The best thing you can do to help us provide you, and everyone, the best possible user experience, is to describe how you use Tatoeba, a little like you are telling a story. You can always provide a solution, but without the story behind it, it doesn't help us figure out the best course of action. That's what my questions were aimed to do: to extract this story.
Now more concretely, you shared this bit of story:
> I've stumbled upon some real gems there a few times, something
> I would have never found if I was trying to search for something.
> I would occasionally translate them. Now it works super weird - I add
> 3 Ukrainian translations out of habit, only to realize 20 seconds later
> it already had Ukrainian translations, they were just hidden.
So this is useful information to me. It is a lot more useful than hearing you say you want to be able to have all translations expanded by default.
It explains why you prefer to have the translations expanded and it also explains why you prefer to have a more compact design. And it helps me understand where precisely are the problems.
Now what I can say is that having the translations expanded by default isn't great if you have tons of translations. The more translations, the more effort for you to spot the existing Ukrainian translations.
For that specific problem that you described, a better solution, in my opinion, would be that whenever you select the translation language, it displays the existing translations in that language.
Having all translations expanded does solve that problem but it is not a solution that will scale in the long run. It works only because at the moment, most sentences don't have more than 10 translations.
But one day, if Tatoeba continues to grow (which I hope it will), we may have 100+ translations on the majority of the sentences, and displaying them all is not exactly usable. There's still time until we get to that point, which means if expanding all translations is the cheapest solution, we can still go for that solution. But that shouldn't stop us from trying to figure out better ones.
For instance we could make an option to allow users to choose how many translations are displayed by default. We chose 5 arbitrarily, but some people like you may need this limit to be higher, perhaps up to 20 or 50 even. We have a similar option for the number of sentences per page (we chose to have 10 by default, but users are able to increase it up to 100). I think that would be longer-term solution than keeping the "expand all translations" option.