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Movie titles
There's a short discussion on http://tatoeba.org/deu/sentences/show/347564 whether movie titles are to be considered sentences.
For me they are just normal vocabulary entries and can already be found in online dictionaries like HanDeDict (for Chinese-German) or I guess EDICT (Japanese-English).
I have to say I don't like the idea of collecting titles of movies/books that much as many translations are really non-literal. "Da Vinci Code" is "Sakrileg" in German. No connection at all.
I'd also argue that Wikipedia already has the link structure, so we don't really collect additional knowledge here.
Maybe somebody else has some good points on this.
Movie titles are somewhere in-between the full sentences and the vocabulary entries. «To Kill a Mockingbird» looks like a dictionary entry (though the capitalisation is different), while «For Whom the Bell Tolls» certainly doesn’t.
There are also newspaper headlines and blurbs that can’t be found in Wikipedia, though represent an important part of the language. See comments to the sentence http://tatoeba.org/sentences/show/328055#comments
OK. I suggest tagging these with the “non-sentence” tag.
But still, it’s not clear why can’t we think of them as of nominative sentences. Like an answer to the question “What have you read/seen this week?”
Another issue I have is that basically titles cannot be translated freely. This is opposite to what Tatoeba defines for most other entries.
Example "To Kill a Mockingbird". In German it was translated as "Wer die Nachtigall stört". A literal translation would be "Die Spottdrossel töten" (Mockingbirgs are confined to the North American continent, so it is changed to reflect a bird native to Middle Europe).
Now we rely on metadata to actually edit this sentence. While tags (the metadata) were introduced to provide extra information we would here need them to actually define the sentence. I'm not saying this can't be done, but I believe this is a very ugly situation.
Those setences were added before the advent of tags, and they didn’t cause much confusion.
You are free to add a literal translation of these, too.
That's not the point. Most people will translate sentences regardless of the tag which just provides additional but not "normative" value.
I do remember stumbling upon a sentence which was a title or proverb, but literally translated into another language, which made no sense. Personally I would appreciate embedding these into a simple sentence such as "Yesterday I watched the movie "...", or "Have you read the novel "..."?" From the surrounding sentence, every reader can see that it is in fact a title of a book, etc. Proverbs should be tagged with an appropriate tag. I guess that would be a viable solution.