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Concerning "Needs Native Check" tags:
Can there be an unofficial rule of etiquette to leave a comment when you tag sentences that aren't your own? I find it particularly hard to look at a sentence that's been NNC-tagged but doesn't have an owner, because I don't know who to discuss the changes with. It's also not clear what might need changing sometimes, since the sentences will be linked to multiple languages, and unless I know them, I am completely in the dark with regard to how my suggestion may change the translation accuracy.
I also suggest renaming the tag. The currect wording prevents us from adding in to Latin sentences. :)
Eh... That's the fate those languages suffer.
I'm just in the process of writing a little wall post about maintenance tags where this is touched on. Essentially, any @change* or @check tag should come with a comment.
The @NNC tag implies that the sentence may not be natural speech and any change to it shouldn't change the meaning. In cases where the change is great enough to warrant reviewing the other sentences, add "@check translation" to the linked sentences and a comment about the change to the (now) formerly @NNC-ed sentence.
As for with who you should have the discussion, the @NNC tagger has (in particular if (s)he didn't leave a comment) implied that (s)he isn't able to judge whether the sentence isn't natural anywhere -- only that it seems strange to him/her. That user may therefore not be the best person to talk to. In that case I suggest just leave a comment and wait for another @check patroller comes along.
But yes, we should certainly encourage the general guideline to add comments on sentences that one adds maintenance tags to.
> "The @NNC tag implies that the sentence may not be natural speech and any change to it shouldn't change the meaning. In cases where the change is great enough to warrant reviewing the other sentences, add "@check translation" to the linked sentences and a comment about the change to the (now) formerly @NNC-ed sentence."
I would argue (and have argued :-) that these are more closely linked than that, because it is very easy to change the meaning and translation accuracy of a sentence while making it more "natural" (in fact, both you and CK almost fell into this trap just recently on one of sysko's sentences - but thankfully it was his sentence and so he was able to explain the meaning).
My biggest complaint is mainly with sentences where things are so, for lack of better word, "weird" that I don't know which natural-sounding variant to propose because I don't know the languages it's linked to. If it's the owner who places the tag, it's fine, because I can ask and they will clarify what exactly they're not sure about (in my experience, the native checker does not always get the meaning of the other language on the first try). When the sentence is orphaned, I can of course leave a comment, but there's no guarantee that it won't fade into oblivion (although, given blay_paul's diligence, it generally doesn't).
I'm completely sympathetic to the view that links can become incorrect once a sentence is fixed. I've even mentioned to Trang adding too many links without the ability to follow up on who made these can cause problems with that.
I absolutely agree that there can be issues where the two, translation and sentence checks, overlap. In these cases I've tagged sentences as both.
In your weird sentence case, just change the sentence to what you consider the most likely one (or just pick one at random), mention the others in a comment, point to it in comments on the linked sentences and tag them with "@translation check".
See: http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/39223 for an example of a sentence where a "fix" led to checks on translations after which some sentences were kept linked and others re-linked to an alternative variant.
> "In your weird sentence case, just change the sentence to what you consider the most likely one (or just pick one at random), mention the others in a comment, point to it in comments on the linked sentences and tag them with "@translation check"."
Not that I'm lazy or anything, but that's a *lot* of work for an orphaned sentence... Few would be willing to do that. Especially when the sentence has a lot of direct translations.
It's either that or wait for a person who knows all the languages. Often that simply isn't possible (as was the case in the sentence linked). Translations are added to unnatural sentences by people who reckon they get the meaning but don't catch the problems with it.
If trusted users or moderators furthermore add links between sentences that they don't own or have commented on, that complicates the matter even further. The only solution is to bring the matter to the attention of all parties.
Yes, it's a lot of work. I know. I've done it a few times already.
The first step is to tag (with one or both of the check-tags) and leave a comment on the sentence. That'll make sure that it will be dealt with eventually.
> It's either that or wait for a person who knows all the languages.
Exactly. No person will know all the languages, but from a probability standpoint, the tagger or the owner would be more likely to know more of them.
But yea, the problem grows very complicated very quickly as people translate/link... There needs to be something in the interface to handle this, cause the lot-of-work method won't be practical. I think you'd agree that few will take the time to do all that, and even if they do, it's just for 1 sentence out of 500,000+...
You're right that the tagger is more likely to know at least some of the languages (as that's how he in most probability got there). Some mass-commenting on the linked sentences will be needed and a more practical means of dealing with it would be nice.
I've mentioned to Trang that I think it would be useful to have "owners" of links as well as sentences. That would be one way to get the attention of the interested parties.
Until then, it's all manual. Well, maybe. As I was writing my last comment I got to thinking that it might not be too difficult to write a script to send comments to all sentences linked to a specific sentence and tag them with "@translation check". I could look into it if you're interested.
> I've mentioned to Trang that I think it would be useful to have "owners" of links as well as sentences. That would be one way to get the attention of the interested parties.
I completely agree with you here. There currently seems to be a duality in Tatoeba between the quality of an individual sentence and the translations it has. If ratings ever come to be realized, this will also resurface as a problem (what do you rate - the naturalness of some given sentence, or the translation?) IMO, the translation is the most important as it is clear who's the responsible party for *both* the naturalness and translation of the two sentences. The only time an owner of any given sentence would play a crucial role would be when he/she creates a sentence from scratch and leaves it untranslated (but as soon as someone does translate it, that someone also takes partial responsibility for the original sentence).
Anyway, it's all a lot of work, and probably wouldn't come for a long, long time unless sysko wins the lottery...
> As I was writing my last comment I got to thinking that it might not be too difficult to write a script to send comments to all sentences linked to a specific sentence and tag them with "@translation check".
This would still require going through and leaving comments on all the tagged sentences, since it wouldn't be clear which link the check refers to.
Not necessarily. The comments could also be generated automatically.
> Please check this is a good match for the following sentence:
> http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/395931
> I've mentioned to Trang that I think it would be
> useful to have "owners" of links as well as
> sentences.
Theoretically they do have owners, since all linking is recorded in the database.
Except for the early ones... I think that many of those are linked by "unknown".
I guess one could then adopt the orphan links by un-and re-linking them (or kidnap other people's ;-) ).