I don't think so. Mary is translated into Maria in German.

I sometimes use the foreign names as is, and sometimes translate them - Tom as Tomi or Tommi, usually.

One can think of in terms of translating the original sentence, in which case the name usually would not be translated (though it might be modified a bit to make it pronouncable in the new language; when speaking of Bjørn in Finnish, we often say Bjørni, which is much easier to say).

Or one can think in terms of what would be the equivalent sentence in the other language. In this case, using a native name is better, if the original name is native to the sentence that one is translating.

Native names are also much easier to pronounce, should someone want to add audio.

I believe the thing to do here is to use either the names as is, or to replace them with a native name, and in any case not worry about it. The contributions will be useful to Tatoeba in both cases.

Someone did.

You can check from "Community" > "Languages of members" who has added Bambara in their profile:

https://tatoeba.org/eng/users/for_language/bam

Apparently there is only one person, and they have not contributed anything. But you could try to contact them via private message, they might respond to your call.

For those who can read English but not French, sacredceltic is saying that most new users are still confusing direct and indirect translations, despite the different colors of arrows [my note: and text] that are used for each. He suggests, in addition, indenting the indirect translations.

I think that his suggestion would help as long as there were a visual element to separate the block of indirect translations from the block of direct translations. Otherwise, it would look as though there were some special relationship between the indirect translations and the last direct translation in the list (that is, the one at the bottom).

It's worth noting that if you go to the settings, the final one, under "Experimental options", is "Display sentences with the new design. Note that you will not have all the features from the old design." If you select this, you will see the captions "Translations" and "Translations of translations" in separate subsections. This is what users who are not logged in see, but it is not the default setting for new contributors.

This leads me to bring up several things that should be improved.
(1) If we think it's useful for new contributors to see a visual distinction between direct and indirect translations, we should do that by default for them.
(2) The differences between the "new" and "old" design are not documented anywhere, so they can only be determined by experimentation. This is at best a waste of time for users, and undoubtedly scares them away from trying the "new" design.
(3) "New" and "old" are both vague and inaccurate, given that this feature has been around for several years.
(4) Features should not be sitting indefinitely in the "Experimental" section. The first three items in that section seem pretty straightforward and should be well-tested by now, so I suggest moving them into the main section. As for the "new" vs. "old" design, we should figure out what we really want to do: Fix the missing functionality in the new design? Incorporate the new elements into the design that everyone sees? Offer a choice between these options permanently? Some combination of these?

I do prefer a ranking that favors exact matches over stemmed matches. Longest common subsequence also sounds good. But sentences having the least number of words are often not the ones I want to see most. I prefer slightly longer ones that give me more context. For that reason, I always choose random ordering. It doesn't always put the sentences that I want at the very top, but at least I have a good chance of finding them without having to go through pages and pages of very short sentences. Also, providing a mix of sentences that is random with regard to sentence length lets people see more diversity. I think that's a good thing.

If I could choose and there were no computational costs:

1. An exact match of the sentence.
2. Sentences with exact match of the query as part of it.
3. Sentences with all the exact words, but possibly in different order or with other words between them.
4. Sentences with all the words, but with stemming and the order might be different etc.
5. Sentences with all but one of the words (with stemming and could be in any order).
6. Sentences with all but two of the words (with stemming and could be in any order).
7. And so on.
8. Sentences with even a single searched word (with stemming).

Random order within the categories. (Some of the categories could be sorted into even finer subcategories, but probably not worth it.)

For example search: haluan kalastaa tänään
1. Haluan kalastaa tänään.
2. Minä haluan kalastaa tänään, niin kuin eilenkin.
3. Tänään minä haluan kalastaa. Haluan kuitenkin kalastaa tänään.
4. Haluankin kalastaa tänään. Haluatteko te tänään tai huomenna kalastamaan?
5. Haluatteko elokuviin tänään?
6-8. Karhut kalastavat lohia.

The idea would be to first have the precise phrase and then to have increasingly distantly related phrases, which hopefully would still give some understanding of the involved words.

It might be placebo, but I feel the search is faster now! Thanks!

Thanks for joining us :)

Great! I contributed some Spanish audios long ago. I'd like to have some free time to go get a microphone and contribute some more! Hopefully some time soon.

Je suis conscient que c’est frustrant, mais sache nous n’avons pas oublié ce problème, il est noté sur Github [1]. Mais merci de nous le rappeler!

C’est toujours le même algorithme de sysko qui détecte les langues, donc cela doit venir de la base de données sur la laquelle il s’appuie. J’avais tenté de la mettre à jour, mais ça n’avait pas résolu le problème. Je vais investiguer ça prochainement et je te tiendrai au courant si j’ai besoin de ton aide pour tester.

[1] https://github.com/Tatoeba/tatoeba2/issues/1731