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** New languages have been added on Tatoeba **
► Kekchi (Q'eqchi') - https://tatoeba.org/eng/sentenc...ne/indifferent
Central Huasteca Nahuatl - https://tatoeba.org/eng/sentenc...ne/indifferent
► Swazi - https://tatoeba.org/eng/sentenc...ne/indifferent
► Balinese - https://tatoeba.org/eng/sentenc...ne/indifferent
► Assyrian - https://tatoeba.org/eng/sentenc...ne/indifferent
[not needed anymore- removed by CK]
I can't agree with CK. In my opinion, clarifying what language is used in the sentence is much more important than whether it's native or non-native, especially that the majority of non-native sentence is correct, even if we cannot be absolutely sure of that. Quite apart from the fact that it's hard for me to imagine someone who looks for sentences in Q'eqchi' and who cares of all the details of its naturalness.
I think it depends. There are many languages, most native speakers of those live in isolated rural areas and belong to the older generation, so it's unlikely to seen them on Tatoeba ever. And there are some people (mostly professional linguists) that studied those languages very carefully and are able to make good and valuable contributions in them.
At the same time there is a kind of "language trolls" who appear on Tatoeba from time to time, that make their contributions in plenty of languages, using grammar books, machine translators, etc without actual knoledge of the languages. So, there is a big chances of mistakes and/or copyright violation. If we don't have any native or professional speakers of those languages who are willing to check and correct their contribution, we will end up with sentences that only mislead people.
I would also like to add that not having a language added could deter any native-speaking visitors. We have a process for adding new languages, but it is not always clear to new users/visitors to this site. If someone visits the site, and doesn't see their language here, more probably than not, they will not create an account here and not come back. Obviously, speakers of rarer languages will not flock to the site, but all it takes is one, in order to have a decent corpus of a language (as per Amastan with Berber, 123xyz with Macedonian, and sabretou with Marathi). Having more languages improves our odds.
I WOULD (in theory) like to see all six thousand odd languages here, though, in all honesty, it would be impossible to verify all activity in the lesser known languages, and easier for trolls to troll on this site. As it is, all the languages we have have plenty of resources. Though it is often impossible to know if a particular sentence is what a native speaker would say, we can definitely know if that sentence is indeed in the language it is supposed to be in and that, at the very least, makes grammatical/syntactical sense. I and several other dedicated users will continue to see to that.
+1
Unfortunately, being a native doesn't mean good sentences ( there are some examples - names that we don't want to remember ). I always make sure that my new "guests" will follow all the Tatoeba instructions carefully.
We surely must be careful about that but as far as Tatoeba collects sentences from ANY languages and some of them are "dying", we should have sentences on that languages or, at least, have this language added here since we may lose contributors on a certain language, as cueyayotl said.