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When I see several sentences that would have the same translation, what should I do?
1. Translate only one of them, thus leaving missing links.
2. Add the same translation to several of them, thus creating duplicate sentences.
3. Ask for the right to make links. I am quite a new contributor with little social interaction with the site, so I do not know if this is appropriate yet.
4. Something else. Please elaborate.
This is especially common when translating English and Scandinavian sentences into Finnish, since for example both "he" and "she" are translated to "hän". These are quite common words, so there are often more than one sentence for which a given Finnish sentence would be an appropriate translation.
First of all, welcome to Tatoeba :)
In case of your option 2, duplicates are automatically merged, so here's what could happen:
first case: if you add a translation and the sentence already exists, the existing sentence is linked to the new sentence you wanted to translate, so no duplicates are actually added, you simply link an existing sentence to another sentence that matches it.
second case: you add a new translation and you don't notice it's already there as a translation of another sentence, but you make a typo or there's the wrong flag, and then you correct your mistake. In this case, there's an automated script (this one: https://tatoeba.org/ita/user/profile/Horus) that automatically merges the exact duplicates, linking just one sentence (I think generally the oldest one) to any sentence where the exact duplicates are added. In this way there's already a script taking care of this without manual work.
Alternatively, you could post a comment on a sentence you want to link to another sentence (or even to more than one sentence), and someone (myself included) will perform the linking you requested, simply add the numbers of the sentences you want to have linked. For example: if you want any sentence to be linked to this sentence: https://tatoeba.org/ita/sentences/show/5552276, use #5552276 as a reference, as it creates a shorter (and more practical, imho) link to the sentence.
I hope everything is clear :)
Just to confirm: It is a good idea to add translations to sentences, even and especially when those translations already appear on other sentences. These extra copies of translations turn into links with no human input.
For example, if there already exists the following (capitals are sentences, dashes are links)
A-B
C
and I add
C-D
where D = B (D and B are the same sentence), then the Horus bot will notice that D=B, remove the duplicate (probably D) and add the link C-B.
So the end result will be
A-B
C-B
and thus I have successfully linked C and B.
yes, in such cases you pointed out the exact duplicate is considered as the already existing sentence, so you successfully linked C and B.
Horus works when you add, for example, "Hello." and "Helo." as translations of two different sentences (like, for example, "Hello." to "Ciao." and "Helo." to "Salut."). The system recognizes the two sentences as completely different (technically they are), but, when you correct "Helo." and change it into "Hello.", this becomes an exact duplicate, so Horus, when scanning the database, sees the two duplicates, and then deletes one of the two, and links it to the other sentence where the other duplicate was linked to. So, if the modified "Helo." gets deleted by Horus, you'll see that the sentence "Hello." (which was like this from the beginning) has been linked also to "Salut.", along with the original link you created for it to "Ciao.".
I hope this cleared things a little bit :)
Yes, thank you. I believe I now understand how this works. Kiitos paljon.
you're welcome :) feel free to ask if you have other doubts
Adding my thanks, as I had silently been wondering about it for a while. Very clear explanation, thank you!
you're welcome :)
" Ask for the right to make links. I am quite a new contributor with little social interaction with the site, so I do not know if this is appropriate yet. "
If you read and understand this https://en.wiki.tatoeba.org/art...-contributors# and feel like you would make good contributions or that you could do better with advanced contributors rights (if you want to do so), I encourage you to apply.
Just as a couple of examples, you could:
- link existing sentences to translations that are currently only indirect translations (when they correspond of course).
- once familiar with the tag system, tag sentences for many purpose, among which @change, @unlink and others that can be checked by corpus maintainers to correct sentences.
- and other things that generally improves the corpus :)
So that is really up to you!