By its nature, Tatoeba leans towards short, complete utterances, even though such short sentences are obviously removed, in most cases, from a larger context. It is possible to construct scenes by assembling Tatoeba sentences into a defined order, and there are sometimes paragraph-long Tatoeba entries consisting of ten or more sentences, but these are frowned on as being unlikely to ever be tackled for translation. Also in such cases, we can run into a limit on the number of characters to be represented, and this can make a Tatoeba translation into certain languages impossible.

As a practical matter, I like to think of Tatoeba as a tool for the language learner and not as a comprehensive multilingual encyclopædia of all possible utterances. For me, in such a tool, sentences should be as short as possible while still conveying some meaning.

For me, a minimal sentence has a noun and a verb. Then there are transitive sentences with a direct and/or indirect object. A few well-chosen adjectives and adverbs add some spice, and then coordinate and subordinate conjunctions link related thoughts together. This works well for most European languages. Different structures are likely necessary for agglutinative languages, and I understand that North American Indigenous languages make use of a fourth-person pronoun on occasion.

Your contributions in Muscogee and Hitchiti will be valuable to Tatoeba, as I think we are unlikely to find a native speaker, which would have been ideal. I would suggest that you begin with the simplest of sentences which can be unambiguously represented in those languages and which are grammatically correct, even though they may convey only a little of the flavour of an Indigenous Knowledge Keeper , Elder or Matriarch relating the oral history from his or her ancestors.

This is probably a little off the point under discussion, but the form "culturally rich" and similar adverb-adjective combinations should not include a hyphen in English. On the other hand, an adjective-adjective combination like "super-rich" is correctly hyphenated.

With respect, I beg to differ, @sacredceltic. It is true that after World War II, the Japanese Ministry of Education has curtailed the use of kanji to some degree, but a Japanese high school graduate will have learnt the 2,136 kanji and will generally use these appropriately.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_jōyō_kanji

I do not speak Japanese, but I picked one sentence at random from @CK’s list (https://tatoeba.org/en/sentence...s/show/170911) and entered it into Google Translate:

#11011895 — posted by @small_snow
バカじゃないの？

Google translated it as « Êtes-vous stupide ? » Reversing the direction of translation — that is, going from French to generate Japanese, reproduced the original sentence, written « バカじゃないの？» or, in romaji, « Bakajanaino? »

While the majority of sentences in Japanese will likely include one or more kanji, I think that @CK may just have intended to produce an interesting list of sentences that correctly use no kanji *because no kanji are needed* to express the words constituting those sentences, currently numbering 2,351.

Rather than somehow labelling these 2,351 sentences as being informal or less literary Japanese, I think the intent may just have been to help beginning students of Japanese, who will have mastered the hiragana syllabary but who have not yet learnt many of the jōyō kanji — a process which takes many years in a typical Japanese person's education.

Kind regards,
Erik (Objectivesea)

Yes, @DJ_Saidez, if all you ultimately want are pronounced versions of individual proper nouns rather than full sentences, one might suggest a site like Forvo.com for this task, since Tatoeba's very raison d'être is to have complete sentences, and someone would then have to extract the village names by editing sound files for the sentences.

Yes, @Sabretou, please do stay and continue working to help make Tatoeba an even better and more welcoming place. I am in awe of your contributions to date; I also joined Tatoeba about ten years ago and have contributed less than a tenth as many sentences as you have. I am cisgender, straight, white, Anglo-Saxon and Caucasian, but I have no tolerance whatsoever for hatred and opprobrium grounded in a desire to arbitrarily and artificially elevate oneself by degrading anyone else.

I am so very sorry that you are finding instances of transphobia, homophobia, xenophobia and racism on this site — appallingly, some of it, as you say, from actual corpus maintainers. I trust that over 95 percent of all contributors to Tatoeba will be as disgusted as I am with any comments or sentences expressing archaic, loathsome and hate-grounded views that seek only to divide the Tatoeba community and to lend support to fascistic narrow-mindedness.

Such sentences, when they occasionally rear their ugly heads, should, in my opnion, be ruthlessly eliminated by the admin staff or, if they have any redeemeable element, be rewritten to emphasize the disapproval of the Tatoeba community. For example, we might recast the loathsome and unacceptable sentence #8734076; salvaged, it might read like this, which I think would be much more respectful and healthier for civil discourse on Tatoeba:

When Karen said that queer adoption is a sort of child abuse, Tom pointed out that the Bible says nothing about gay parents adopting children. "Furthermore," he argued, "over 17 million children worldwide have neither father nor mother, and they would unquestionably be better off with two loving parents. Whether those parents are gay or straight should not matter in the slightest."

If people collect heinous and unacceptable sentences and notify me, I would be more than happy to recommend improvements along such lines to the admins or, alternatively, to pronounce them unsalvageable and recommend their immediate deletion.

We should not find any serious objection arising to this remedy on spurious free-speech grounds, as one person's civil rights must end at the point where they interfere with the civil rights of others, and no individual or group should be abused by calculated repetion of poisonous comment.

If we get a promise from the admins to purge Tatoeba of hostile sentences, could we persuade you, @Sabretou, to resume your yeoman service to world culture and peace among nations?

— Objectivesea (Victoria, B.C., Canada)

From Wikipedia: "Romani is an Indo-Aryan language with strong Balkan and Greek influence.... The linguistic evidence has indisputably shown that the roots of the Romani language lie in India: the language has grammatical characteristics of Indian languages and shares with them a large part of the basic lexicon, for example, regarding body parts or daily routines." The article mentions that the Dom or Domba people of North India have genetic, cultural and linguistic links to the Roma.

Also, "Romani and Domari share some similarities: agglutination of postpositions of the second layer (or case marking clitics) to the nominal stem, concord markers for the past tense, the neutralisation of gender marking in the plural, and the use of the oblique case as an accusative. This has prompted much discussion about the relationships between these two languages. Domari was once thought to be a sister language of Romani, the two languages having split after the departure from the Indian subcontinent – but later research suggests that the differences between them are significant enough to treat them as two separate languages within the Central zone (Hindustani) group of languages. The Dom and the Rom therefore likely descend from two migration waves out of India, separated by several centuries."

I beg to differ with @nipbud, for whom I have great respect, on this point. In my opinion (and perhaps by Tatoeba policy), Rhaeto-Romantsh is cool, but Romani and Rumanian are equally cool. The story of how and why languages have evolved over time in different places, sometimes from contact and sometimes in isolation, is extremely fascinating to me.

The equal treatment of multiple languages is one of the things I really appreciate about Tatoeba. Best wishes to all Tatoebans for happy holidays.

Thank you, Thanuir, for the very helpful advice. I appreciate your help.

I have contributed a sentence from Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the original French (#11216576, 1762) and from published public-domain translations (English, #11216579, 1911; Hungarian, #11216631, 1911; and Finnish, #11216638, 1905). In addition, I have made my own translation into Esperanto (#11216580, released under the normal Tatoeba licence).

Because French is not my strongest language and my knowledge of two of these languages (Finnish and Hungarian) is virtually nonexistent, I’ve confirmed through Google Translate that a one-to-one correspondence as to the general meanings of these sentences exists in the public-domain published translations I have selected for contribution to Tatoeba.

Before I post any more such sentences from classic public-domain works, I’d like to ask more experienced Tatoebans if my making such multi-language postings is a worthwhile project.

That's cool to see. I don't speak Japanese, but both the Japanese-only and the English-only versions are plausible to me. For "Who set up this server?" I would have wished for a little more stress on the first word, however, if this is possible.

The third video convincingly shows that the AI cannot yet handle language switching inline. You might want to ask the Synthesia folks to build in a per-sentence language specification ability. This would be a much more elegant solution than requiring tedious manual edits between every sentence when creating such a bilingual video.

Some of the flags you mention have superimposed on them what is properly a coat of arms or a blazon. Often these highly complex flags are used only for special ceremonies or by special branches of a country's government, and a simpler design with two or three stripes but without the coat of arms will be used for everyday purposes. Regardless, when reduced to 30 x 20 pixels, flag designs reduce any highly detailed representations to an indiscernible blur.

I've simplified the second design to remove the concentric circles of the impossibly small hebrew-style characters and enlarged the menorah as much as possible. You can take a look here:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w...amaic_flag.svg

From a flag-design point of view, this is unnecesssarily complex. The two blue bars are very simple indeed, but the centre image, unfortunately, is in almost photographic detail. A good flag design should be able to be drawn by a six-year-old with two or three crayons and be recognizable after about five minutes of drawing. If you can drastically simplify the central design, it may work better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexillology

I agree with PaulP on deleting hate speech, as well what in the Canadian parliament is called unparliamentary speech — i.e., personal character attacks on identifiable people that would get a Member of Parliament ejected for the rest of the day if he or she did not immediately withdraw the offensive remark. If Tatoeba were to delete such hateful sentences, they should be promptly deleted in all translated versions as well, which I think would require the intercession of an administrator.

That part of what I wrote is clearly erroneous; sorry. At most, the others shared a similar purpose but their final form arose from different design decisions.

Besides Esperanto (887 Tatoeba contributors) and its offshoots Ido (45), Interlingua (48), Interlingue (24) and Lingua Franca Nova (25), Tatoeba has sentences in Toki Pona (161), Lojban (92) and Volapük (14). We even have 22 Klingon contributors, nearly all of whom are in fact native to the United Federation of Planets.

English: I couldn't make sense of most of it.
Esperanto: Mi ne trovis sencon en la plej multo el ĝi.
Klingon: HochHomDaj vIyajlaHbe'.

I do notice, @tlontb, that after English, your second strongest language is Ukrainian. One useful service you could do for Tatoeba would be to search for Ukrainian sentences that have not yet been translated to English. If you think you understand the Ukrainian version of a particular sentence perfectly, why not make the attempt to translate into English? Here's a list that could help get you started:

<https://tatoeba.org/en/sentence...and_seed=aTDQ>

This is a website for translating good sentences from one language to another. If you speak another language besides Finnish, you can find sentences written in that language and help Tatoeba by translating them into Finnish. Posting links to websites that promote gambling, however, is unhelpful to the mission of Tatoeba. You can find a copy of our guidelines here:
https://en.wiki.tatoeba.org/art...how/guidelines

I believe you have to be accepted on the Transifex Tatoeba Icelandic (IS) team before contributing translations. Per <https://www.transifex.com/tatoe...ms/28284/is/>, it seems that @tommy_san is the current project coordinator at Transifex. Two translators to Icelandic are on the team already: Marijn Kuiper (@MarijnKp) and Fabian Becker (halfdan). I am sure they would welcome your participation with enthusiasm. Good luck, @nipbud

I believe that the way to be able to add tags to individual sentences is to ask for, and to be granted, "Advanced Contributor" status. That you have already posted over 11,000 sentences to Tatoeba in the last 3.5 years augurs well for you in this regard. Good luck.

One sentence-ranking method might be to programatically hold a poll or election among the suggested alternatives, with the electorate perhaps restricted to those Tatoebans who have met some criterion, like a minimum number of postings and/or "advanced contributor" status.

For more fun, a user could have, say, up to ten votes to allocate at will among the alternative translations. So user A could indicate his or her preference by casting five votes for sentence W, three for sentence X and one each for Y and Z, for example, and users would not be able to cast votes for sentences they themselves own.

Once a sentence had accumulated, say, 25 votes from three or more separate users, a little bullet or star could display next to that sentence, or the sentence could be displayed in a bold font instead of a regular one.

On the downside, this idea might be somewhat difficult to program, might add too much overhead to Tatoeba's data storage needs and could be subverted by users insincerely upvoting unreliable translations.