So do you filter the sentences according to your comment, or do you mark them somewhere else AND put a comment in?
I just want to know how we should approach sentences we find should not appear there (e.g. hiragana-kanji variants of exactly the same sentence.)

Hi Paul, I saw you always post a comment "Not for WWWJDIC" in each sentence. Shouldn't that be solved by using tags?

Two questions about tags:
Shall we tag idioms with "set_phrase"?
Is there a tag for TVV series, movie title, etc?
CK's page only has "book_title".

I do remember stumbling upon a sentence which was a title or proverb, but literally translated into another language, which made no sense. Personally I would appreciate embedding these into a simple sentence such as "Yesterday I watched the movie "...", or "Have you read the novel "..."?" From the surrounding sentence, every reader can see that it is in fact a title of a book, etc. Proverbs should be tagged with an appropriate tag. I guess that would be a viable solution.

Hi CK,
I completely agree with your notion of near duplicates versus clutter.
I think that besides "dealing" with clutter that already exists, we should also put some effort into guidelines about creating new content.

Yes, please do so, though I think it would be preferable to have a list or even a search function for such sentences.

Dear Trang, dear Sysko:
Would it be possible to do this on the contribution webpage, e.g. when one selects "ger->jpn",to show example sentences in German which have no Japanese equivalent, or is this to heavy a burden for the database? As the current system shows only 15 sentences, maybe this might also reduce the complexity of the search.

A general remark: Given the huge amount of Japanese data, I think we need more Japanese contributors to help us with the correction and to keep the Japanese sentences more consistent. Talking to my Japanese language partner recently, I came to the conclusion that with its current features, tatoeba is rather unattractive for Japanese natives who want to learn another language, because most sentences are already translated to Japanese. For example, what would be the benefit for my partner who learns German?

To the admins:
When I add a new sentence, I cannot immediately add this sentence to a list. The "->[]" Button does not work. If I change to the main screen and click on the sentence I added, then I can add it to the list.
Is this a bug?
(I use Ubuntu 10.04 and Firefox 3.6.3)

Yes, you are right, producing new content is also important, though I as a native German speaker am right now mostly busy with adding German translations to the already existing Jap-Eng. sentence pairs. And that's when I came across these near-duplicates.
Currently I am thinking about how I could involve my Japanese language exchange partner to produce some content. At least, I will check with her some sentences I found dubious.

So how would be the best procedure if I come across such a sentence pair? Make a comment? Add it to the "mark for deletion" list?

I am not sure whether this is worth discussing, but there are some sentences which are really redundant, e.g.
162883, 83091, two rather long sentences which only differ in the subject being "my mom" vs. "my dad".
Shouldn't we remove one of such pairs and concentrate on the gist instead of wasting our efforts on translating countless variants?

I am not sure how promising this is, but there is a Japanese-German sentence database hosted by the University of Hiroshima (Katsumi Iwasaki). It seems to have been created in 2004, without major updates since then. Maybe there could be a collaboration with tatoeba, thus increasing the number of sentence pairs. Of course, I am not sure about whether they want to publish the corpus, I am especially unfamiliar with data policies in Japan.

Here are the links to the search engine, the data description and the researcher's website:
http://www.vu.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/deutsch/index.php
http://home.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/k...a/database.htm
http://home.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/katsuiwa/

Comments on grammar and expression might be helpful, but only if the original sentence was visible at that time.
Comments about a sentence which has already be changed are confusing. So either there should be a "sentence stamp" showing the sentence at the time the comment was made, or we have to include the sentence in our comment if we want to write something "noteworthy" which should be kept for a longer time.

I would agree to Muriel. I suppose the cleanest way to do this is to allow the sentence owner to delete comments. Thus, after correcting a mistake, he could remove all the outdated comments.

I can only see the first ten favourite sentences. The other sentences are not accessible, as far as I see.

I think we should remove requests for error fixes after the error is fixed, because the comments rather confuse people who read the corrected sentences and the outdated comments.

That would be really awesome if you could implement this.

A general question about Chinese:
Is there a policy regarding simplified and traditional Hanzi?
I just found a sentence (nº346168) with traditional Hanzi posted by someone from Hongkong. So far the "policy" seems to be that both scripts will be put under the same category. This might be a burden for people learning the language who do not recognize the differences.

Does anyone else have problem with the updated version as well?
I use Ubuntu 9,10 with firefox 3.5.8, and since the update today, I cannot add new sentences. For each sentence I see this turning circle on the left (before I saw it only when I edited the sentence), and pressing "submit translation" does not seem to work.

Being a native German speaker, I came across both Japanese and English sentence which I felt were not correct, however I was not 100% sure.
It would be a cool feature if non-natives could mark a sentence as "questionable", and then this sentence could be checked and corrected or verified by a native speaker. I suppose this would be rather easy to implement using the word list feature. So a non-native speaker would not correct a sentence which he is not 100% sure about, but put it into this list, and native speakers could occasionally go through the list and check for grammatical errors. This would drastically improve the quality of the sentences, if the feature is known and used by most users.