For what it's worth - I don't come to Tatoeba that often, but every time I do, like today, sacredceltic is abusing someone in the comments or in the forum.
It is very unpleasant and makes me not want to come back.

My own contributions may be insignificant, but I have no doubt that he is harming the community by driving away valuable contributors.

Of course, as he says, he manages to do this perfectly well without being a corpus maintainer.

So you'll be using a newly developed database and writing the webpage in C++?
Not to say it won't work, but I hope you'll be keeping good backups. ^_^;

I never had a problem in Opera, but in browsers like Firefox this can be quite annoying, yes. If you want the whole sentence, dragging from the left margin should work.

I've been thinking about this, too. I sometimes come across words or expressions that don't have a usage example, but don't feel confident enough to construct a suitable sentence for Tatoeba. It would be nice to request a sentence that uses word or idiom X.
Maybe a thought for the future if we get a forum. We could have a request board with per-language threads.

> I am not the one to call this Globish. I didn't coin that word, ...

A book by that title was indeed published in May this year.
That doesn't mean that the word is in common use, and your use of it to refer also to Anglicisms in non-English languages seems to be novel.

Moreover its use was quite unnecessary. You appear to be denigrating people's abilities and efforts by saying they cannot learn 'proper' English:

"Lately, Globish has seen thousands of new contributions, making it the number 1 language ahead of Japanese, ..."
"Every newcomer who has a year of school Globish keys in always the same phrases, as everyone knows."
"Actually, it should be new Globish phrases altogether that should be banned !"

No one has a 'year of school Globish'. (Unless perhaps they have taken a course in Globish® from Globish Solutions Inc.)
Even if they should learn a language somewhat poorly, that by itself cannot be called 'Globish' as described by Robert McCrum in the NYT article.
Tatoeba does not currently accept 'Globish' sentences. That's why it says 'English' (or French, or whatever your highly personal definition of 'Globish' involves.) Some sentences are currently wrong, or unnatural sounding to a native speaker, and they should be corrected, but they are by no means 'Globish' except incidentally or insofar that some proper English sentences are also 'Globish'.

> I don't see why calling this mess "Globish" would be inflammatory since Brits call it that.

*A* Briton called *something* 'Globish'. I don't think he was referring to Tatoeba, nor that he was speaking for all Britons. You might as well call it "this mess", because your tone smacks of it, and at least then you might understand why it could be perceived as inflammatory.

> You're just a rude person.

Me? Non, I'm the sweetest soul you'll ever see. Hypothetically, assuming we will meet, which we will not.
And I edit out all the rude stuff before I post.

"Lately, Globish has seen thousands of new contributions, making it the number 1 language ahead of Japanese"
You said there were over 152920 sentences in 'Globish'. Don't say ridiculous things if you don't want to be corrected.

I had no intention of intruding on your discussion of the French language's evolution, I merely thought to inform you that I found your tone opinionated and inflammatory, and that your use of the poorly-defined 'Globish' was probably not helping your cause.

They may call it 'Globishisation', but they don't write much about it, because Google finds just a handful of uses.

'Globish' is a trademark of Globish Solutions Inc. and refers to a subset of English, *not* to English mangled by non-native speakers. I doubt you'll find the word in any reputable dictionary, so I suggest you to cease with the 'baby-talk' and say "international English" if you must.

The Scandinavian countries use either US or British English. The incident you speak sounds like nothing more or less than slip of the tongue that could have happened in any language, even her own, though at least then nearly no one would have understood her.
Other examples include John "Berliner" F. Kennedy, and George W. Bush, a native US English speaker who certainly didn't find the lack of language barriers a hindrance to drawing ridicule.

You say 'Globish' is ridicule, and you say the sentences on Tatoeba are 'Globish'. I think you are unlikely to grammatically embarrass yourself with the vast majority of sentences on Tatoeba, though, so I'm sure there must be some misunderstanding here.

Because that's what it is called? You would seem like less of a crank and a hypocrite if you stuck to common definitions instead of arguing that French is not French and that English is Globish (which is an ambiguous term, and your use of it is almost certainly inaccurate either way.)

Then please change these lines when you get the time, and good luck with your training. :)

--- a/generic_functions.js 2010-09-17 02:25:04.000000000 +0200
+++ b/generic_functions.js 2010-09-17 02:22:08.000000000 +0200
@@ -25,9 +25,8 @@
}

function get_tatoeba_root_url() {
- var hostname = self.location.hostname;
- var port = self.location.port;
+ var host = self.location.host;
var interfaceLang = get_language_interface_from_url();

- return "http://" + hostname + ":" + port + "/"+ interfaceLang;
+ return "http://" + host + "/"+ interfaceLang;
}

Any chance of getting this fixed? Switching to Firefox for anything that uses AJAX is a bit annoying.

It would work if get_tatoeba_root_url() in generic_functions.js returned "http://tatoeba.org/eng" instead of "http://tatoeba.org:/eng"

It should be fairly simple, but I could make a patch if required.

I cleared my cache and tried again, but I'm afraid I don't see any difference.

It seems that get_tatoeba_root_url() returns "http://tatoeba.org:/eng", and Opera doesn't like having the colon without a port number.

I'm having trouble adding translations with Opera (10.62).
When I press "Submit translation", the wheel just spins forever and nothing happens.
It works fine from Firefox.

That's a nice utilization!
It matches the speed I get at http://www.typeonline.co.uk/typingspeed.php pretty closely - shorter sentences go a fair bit faster, probably because I can memorize them before the timer starts.

Again, I don't see how that's any different when B and C are different languages.

> I dislike that on principle because Tatoeba is a collection of translations, not a collection of explanations.
How about if it had been a "language learning resource"? :)

Both the cases in your example are already commonly seen for sentences in different languages, with the problems you state, and should be solved by linking together all three.

I think it's a reasonable thing to do to explain archaic language and idiomatic expressions.
I've sometimes added alternative translations for such sentences in the English sentences needing confirmation list, though not by linking together the English sentences. I don't see any reason why two same-language sentences should not be linked together if they have the same meaning, though.

A format I've seen other places is sentence #123, which is convenient because you can generalize it to list #123, wall #123, etc. Sentence links may be common enough to warrant a shorter special syntax, though.

I also think the syntax should be kept in the final post, e.g. if you use ##, it should turn into <a href=tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/123>##123</a>, so new users can immediately tell how it's done. Using the format other places, like in the message logs, also helps discoverability.

The sentence view is broken now.

A proposal for the Japanese romanisation:
I think both romaji and kana readings should be shown on the site. While there's some agreement that serious students of the language should be reading kana, having the romaji makes the site more accessible for silly things like learning to say "I love you" in twenty languages.

As for how to generate it, I'd suggest using the B lines where possible. If there's no B line, or if the B line does not match the text (for instance because of names in the sentence), generate the reading with MeCab, which looks pretty solid.
This may require names and other unindexed items to be added to a B line if the romanisation needs to be corrected. Just the reading will do.

Does this sound reasonable?

I'm motivated to work on this if necessary, but it will probably be a little while before I have the time. First up would be to create the B line to reading converter, and then use it to test MeCab's accuracy on our data.

There are entries like '|1' in front of most parentheses that aren't described at http://www.edrdg.org/wiki/index.php/Tanaka_Corpus. I'm guessing they're indices for the reading?