this appears to be a good way of dealing with it.

is there any sensible way this could be suggested to all users?

hey...how about creating a rule that says numbers have to be written out?

to me its quite annoying to have sentences with numbers in ciphers in languages in which i don´t know how to pronounce those ciphers.

example: "There are 3 apples in the basket." - "Hay 3 manzanas en la canasta." => a spanish native will read "There are (tres) apples in the basket." - and an english native "Hay (three) manzanas en la canasta."

i think, he/she/it meant the thingy when adding a sentence. he/she/it doesn´t want to have to change the flags. he/she/it contributes mostly low saxon sentences, which have similarities to german and dutch. so autodetect will show them as either. the problem -to which i have no solution- is that the thingy switches back from low saxon to autodetect.

hey....i installed this, but don´t know where exactly to put the list of languages i want.

also: does this work for "show several random sentences" too?

Ich habe gerade eine StudiVZ-Gruppe namens Tatoeba.org gegründet. VZ-Mitglieder also immer hinein da: http://www.studivz.net/Groups/O...ee80e070614900

danke, xeklat, für diese erklärung. und vor allem: danke für den ton, in dem du sie verfasst hast.

most polyglots may not speak english (again: could you post your numbers?), but english still seems to be the most commonly spoken language in the world. no i don´t have numbers for that.

if you think another language may be more appropriate, please use it.

as you keep demanding numbers: where did you take the numbers for "German is the 1st language in number of speakers in Europe, far ahead of English." from? and are you sure the survey did not only count native speakers?

as you may know, there are no official statistics on who speaks/understands which language on tatoeba, but even though the number of german native speakers may be high in this thread, the number of those who understand english is higher. all of the german natives here (in this thread) are capable of expressing themselves in english. there are (yes, i´m guessing, but common sense seems to be with me) less non-german natives who speak or understand german than non-english natives who speak or understand english, as it is the lingua franca (or at least the one and only language that comes near this status).

imho the degree of impoliteness grows with the number of people excluded.

and yes, saying "i think" certainly has the status of a decree.

okay, hans, you´ve convinced me. if this corpus is to be used by machines, translating names can indeed lead to problems, so from now on i´ll not do it anymore and i´ll review my sentences and change translated names.

something seems to be wrong with the email-notifications. only some few are sent to me, while most are not. this started yesterday and i´m not the only one this is happening to.

@zifre: you don´t have to use chinese characters, when you translate a chinese name. let´s say you have a sign that says "chang", why not just write "Mr. Smith" instead of "Mr. Chang" - given that chang really means smith? i guess it would work the other way around too and would not be too confusing.

@CK: by translating names one generates a sentence which is nearer to the language it is written in than to the original sentences language. so in the end it´s more standard-use but non-standard-translation.

@xeklat: significantly less people in here speak german than english, so i think it´s a bit impolite for an english speaker to exclude those who don´t understand german from you thoughts. nonetheless thanks for your approval.

how does tatoeba deal with translating names, as long as they´re not related to any specific person? to me it would make sense, translating the "John" an english sentence to "Giovanni" in italian and "Johann" in german, despite the fact that a real John wouldn´t change his name. one could see the relations between the names much better, if they were translated.

so, not having found anything concerning that issue in the faq and after some discussion on this http://tatoeba.org/deu/sentences/show/780147 sentence i want to ask the community what it thinks.

hey everybody,

yesterday i´ve finally found a useful new tag, which i added. i called it "most important phrases" and its sense is to sum up the phrases one will need most or first when visiting a country or learning a language, such as "What time is it?", "My name is Balthusius Wallenkamp." or "We need a doctor!".

so everyone who has the right to tag, please tag the most important phrases as such.

grüezi a todos
BS