I DO have a $1 "Elementary Turkish" book on my shelf... But no, seriously, there must be a better way of doing this.

PM him (her?) in Tatar and see what happens...

As one of the two active Turkic language contributors apart from boracasli, I nominate Demetrius for this job.

Let's not be hasty here... "Clear" and "online" are two words that should rarely be used together in the same sentence.

Call blay_paul and ask him to arrange housing, transportation, etc.

That's a bit far away, as much as I'd love to go back.

I'm insulted that you'd use this wall-of-righteous-logic approach with me, and expect me to take it seriously. We've known each other for ages now... Come on. Seriously. Anyway, good night to you, sir. The day ends in Europe.

I believe that the joke was in good humor ;-)

And you are now, unfortunately, proving them right.

I believe they were poking fun at your tendency to make a big deal out of things. Personally, I find your dedication admirable, but certainly can empathize with their viewpoint :-)

Go and have your meeting with Obama. Wouldn't want you running late...

Here we go again... Never a dull moment chez Tatoeba.

I took a look at the Russian/French. Most of them look okay to me.

I like your use of footnotes ;-)...

Personally, I think a mass-tagging, as blay_paul has suggested in another case, would be sufficient. Just @check them and leave it at that. Unfortunately, there aren't any active Turkish contributors on currently to validate his Turkish sentences (though they're *probably* okay). I say @check the ones that people have voiced concern over (notably the English ones, as I understand).

On a side note, I wonder if he's really 12...

blay_paul brings down the iron fist...

Degree of Grammatical Liberty in Translations:

This is probably a difficult point to set rules on, but it should be discussed. We know we shouldn't translate word-for-word, and that we should take liberties to make sure that the translation carries the same meaning and sounds natural in the language it is translated to. But... how liberal is too liberal?

As a good example, I can think of this:

"This book is good." (A) and "This is a good book." (B)

When people translate on the fly (as probably many do), these two can get mixed up. French would also have these two analogous variants, for example:

"C'est un bon livre." (A) vs. "Ce livre est bon." (B)

I imagine that it is not at all impossible to interlink all four, as they have virtually the same meaning, and the only thing that differs is the grammatical structure (one states the existence of a good book while the other states the existence of the good quality to the given book).

You also run into issues when you deal with languages that are less similar. Chinese (I think, though I could be wrong), takes B much more often than A. In that case, do we simply use B and link it to the A and B's of the French and English? Or do we try to preserve both structural variants and label one of them "rare"?

So again, how liberal is too liberal, and where's the happy balance between meaning and structure?

Mass-tagging:

Is it possible? Can mods do it?

We really need the flags before the duplicate-script removal starts eliminating Bosnian sentences as duplicates of the Croatian... ;-)

(just kidding, I differentiated all the flags)

Nope :-)

I add all three versions together when I add Bosnian/Croatian.

(Croatian as well, please)

Yes. Especially because there are going to be lots, lots more...