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Could someone please tell me what the benefit of adopting a sentence is? Also, for what reason might I let a sentence go?
[REMOVED by CK: This comment was no longer needed.]
Thank you.
So what would you say if I have sentences in languages other than my native language, would it be better to let them go?
[REMOVED by CK: This comment was no longer needed.]
Thanks CK!
As a new member, I find your thoughts on how to improve the Tatoeba Corpus to be a most helpful guideline: clear and well-argued.
So how would you suggest one contribute to a language that is not one's mother tongue? How I see it, there are only 4 possibilities, but I might be missing some.
1. Not doing anything, hopping someone else will eventually add a sentence with the word you wish to see.
2. Send a PM to a native speaker with the sentences we would like to add, so that he or she can do it themself after checking this is correct.
3. Add the sentence and let it go, hopping someone will adopt it, and correct it if needed.
4. Add the sentence and not let it go, making sure it is correct and natural sounding, by, for instance, taking it from a non-copyrighted source.
How I see it, each of them has downsides. (2) will bother a native speaker on a more or less regular basis. (3) introduces potentially a lot of orphaned sentences and (4) does not give any proof that the sentence is correct to other users.
Then again, I have been here for only two days, so there might be a better way I just haven't thought about yet.
Here's another possibility:
5. Add a sentence in your native language and ask for it to be translated into the language that you want. If you have many such sentences, consider adding them to a list so that they're easy to keep track of. If you worry about overloading a single native speaker, you can ask multiple ones to translate them. Many native speakers, far from being bothered by such requests, enjoy fulfilling them.
Of course, by working in this way, while you're strengthening the Tatoeba corpus by adding good sentences in your native language, and by encouraging others to add translations into their native languages, you're not exercising your own ability to create sentences in a language that is not native to you. However, I believe that there are places other than Tatoeba that are better suited to working on that skill.
And here's yet another way that is similar to your (2):
6. Send a PM to a native speaker with the *words* (as opposed to sentences) that you would like to add.
If you write sentences in a non-native language, then if they're not simple (in which case there are likely to already be sentences existing in the corpus that we should avoid duplicating), they may well end up being in that gray area where they may not be precisely wrong, but they don't resemble something that a native speaker would write. This is harder for most native speakers to deal with than translating a sentence from another language or creating a new sentence based on a word.
You can just add sentences while you remember to request for verification from a native.
Simply write the comment (or tag) : @needs native check
You certainly can do this, and many people do. One issue, however, is that comments and tags are not visible in lists of sentences, or in sentences that are downloaded from the site and viewed externally (at least the way that most clients would use it).
Another is that if your sentence is translated before being corrected, it will be hard to clean up later (especially if it is translated into multiple languages). Whoever attempts the cleanup will need to either know the languages into which it was translated, or ask others for guidance, and sentences will need to be unlinked and relinked. There's a good chance that the sentence will simply remain as is and the cleanup will never happen. It's a good idea only to translate sentences from people who self-identify (in their profile) as native speakers of the language in which the sentences are written, but not everyone follows that advice.
Thanks for the answers, I'll do my best to follow the advices.
Thanks CK! I think your points make a lot of sense, thanks for sharing.
The one thing I am not completely clear about is the near-duplicates. The sentences "He is happy", "She is happy" and "They are happy" technically carry different information. So in case they all are correct translation of one and the same sentence, how do you decide which one deserves to be used, and which one doesn't?
If a sentence has multiple valid translations, you can add all of them.
Nero, that's what I was thinking as well. Just trying to understand how that could cause a problem (if it could).
Rather than letting them go, ask someone who knows that language to keep an eye on your sentences.