It seems silly that this hasn't been brought up before, but why not add a note about the need for periods and capitalization? I think a lot of new users are just not aware of this point until they get commented on.

There are multiple points in doing so:

1) The learning principle. A native speaker correcting it serves as a lesson. One side educates, and the other rectifies a certain mistake and probably won't repeat it. If you go for pure efficiency, then you annihilate this aspect, which, IMO, would be a pity. You'd probably want an environment where people can grow. That involves making mistakes and learning.

2) People grow attached to sentences. Absurd, but we do. They're often a reflection of a person's wit, identity, or interests. And if you're only, say, 95% sure of the translation and would like a check, seeing it orphaned and then with another person's name on it is... well, strange.

3) The native check is mostly to make sure that the grammar and the naturalness of the sentence doesn't have any issues, while the originator of the sentence has a responsibility towards all the translations that it's linked to, and how the sentence fits in on the whole. In this sense, it *is* more work. The person adopting the sentence has to be able to guarantee that all the translations remain valid when he fixes.

> Инјекциjа!

I should have said "this is never the case, with the exception of a few foreign words". A small dictionary could be made for those, but the loss isn't great if the transliteration doesn't handle them properly.

> No, as far as I know. Latin requires breaking these with ': ng and n'g.

In that case, it's fine.

> I disagree here. You'd need a big dictionary
> for Latin to Arabic.

I meant Arabic to Latin.

> But injekcija = инјекциjа, not ињекциjа. So you need a dictionary when transcribing from Latin...

Good point. But transliteration can't handle letter pair --> single letter correspondence? That would be much easier than a dictionary. Unless there are instances of "nj" that are нј and not њ, but this is never the case. Anyway, there are nearly no Latin Serbian submissions up to now, and so a one-way from the Cyrillic (if that's what it comes down to), is perfectly okay, IMO.

> Uighur

I disagree here. You'd need a big dictionary for Latin to Arabic. One particular example is n+g and ng (نگ and ڭ). The Latin "ng" could be transliterated as either. I think there are other cases, as well (personally, I don't much like the Latin Uighur...)

Arabic to Latin WITHOUT proper names is perfectly all right, in my opinion. It's not perfect, but it would still make a world of difference and people would usually be able to figure out what should be capitalized anyway.

As a side note, you should probably select "Show Translations in...", then "All Languages". Sometimes, there's already a good English-to-Russian translation, but it just hasn't been linked. For efficiency reasons, it might be better to just request that someone with the power to link link the two.

Click on the English flag on the top right corner of the main page. This will give you ALL the English sentences available. Then on the right side you'll see options to narrow down the list. You want to choose the one "Show Sentences Not Directly Translated Into...", and then "Russian". Voilà.

Question Regarding Transliterations:

How much work, and what exact steps, are needed to set up a transliteration system for a specific language? I ask because we have a number of languages now that can be written in multiple alphabets. For many of these, the task seems to be a very simple one, as a one-to-one letter correspondence between the alternative alphabets exists (e.g. Serbian). For some, it is only possible to do it in one way but not the other (unless a dictionary is available), but again, the task should not be a difficult one as the majority of the current entries are inputted on the good side of the one-way (e.g. Uighur, Uzbek, and - I think, but Demetrius could confirm - Tatar).

So, what would one have to do to realize this?

> (sentences with the native-check tag should probably be orphaned so that a sufficiently proficient speaker can adopt them)

I disagree on this point. There's a reason why it's "Needs Native Check" (rather than "Needs Native Parent"). The creator of the phrase should keep the phrase, and there's no more work in checking than in parenting (in fact, parenting would involve the check anyway).

Just out of curiosity, do you have a particular moderator:user ratio in mind?

You're right. Those are also the reasons why I'm a bit conflicted about it. My only comments:

1) On keen users

Yes, I think a lot of us have been there. I would have hated it if people told me I could, say, only contribute 10 sentences/day when I started. At the same time, when you have bad keen users, you do run into the double-edged problem. Perhaps moderators could play a key role here, and manually raise the quota for users who request it (under the condition that it be lowered back if the trust is betrayed).

2) On "exotic" languages

Similar comment. Perhaps a mod could raise the quota and let the user contribute, then lower it if doubt arises for whatever reason. Also the same double-edged problem, too. What if a user contributes completely bogus sentences in some exotic language? Well, that's less likely, but still...

I brought up a similar point before, but this is different. When a user productively contributes bad sentences, it is a major problem (it's not always easy to detect, and "volunteer" contributors don't have time to police each other), and so I agree with Demetrius that some sort of system needs to be in place.

I would agree with what Trang has said before, in that banning users isn't the solution (not unless Tatoeba makes strict application procedures, which would probably do more harm than good).

The only "smart", "automatic" way for these kinds of problems to be handled, IMO, is to set up some sort of quota system, where users can contribute more sentences as their "trustworthiness" increases (based on feedback from other users). I have also proposed this before as an automatic means of regulating sentence quality. But it's probably a pipe dream, as it may be hard to code, and probably couldn't be implemented for a long, long while...

I think a similarity match would be really nice. Like in Google. E.g.:

Your sentence "A went to the store with B" was not found. Did you mean:

"C went to the store with B"
"A went to the hardware store with B"
"A and B went to the park"
etc.
etc...

It would at least let the searcher know what's out there. Better yet, it would be nice to have an automatic check before submitting a brand new sentence (NOT a translation). E.g.:

Your sentence "A went to the store with B" is already very similar to...

etc.
etc...

(I think it could also be a powerful tool if you want native speakers to swarm to a specific sentence as well... Since it's very easy to miss comments, but the tag is easy to find. But yea, too liberal of a use would not be great either...)

Strange...

Just so you know, it wasn't me who put the tag ;-)

I have occasionally done it to other people's sentences, but I generally try to leave a "NNC-tagged" comment to indicate that I was the one who tagged it. I do think it's a powerful tool for people to use on their own sentences, though... (though only trusted users can tag)

I think English deserves a pat on the back (150,000 sentences).

3 hoorahs for English...

General Question:

What's Tatoeba's official policy on a user's behavior? Specifically, if a user flat out uses insulting names to refer to other users (i.e. calling them dogs), derides them (i.e. by creating a caricature and building on it), and makes fun of them in a way that an immature high schooler would, do the moderators take action or is the user allowed to continue? I don't think this has been addressed at all since the problem hasn't really come up much (if at all) before, but as it has now, it would be nice to hear the official stance on this.

Likewise, I mark idiomatic translations as "Adapted Translation" and non-idiomatic ones as "Literal Translation".

Regarding, again, sentence quality:

I would propose a much more liberal use of the "Needs Native Check" tag (or something similar, if it already exists). I see right now that it's been mostly used by myself (and somewhat by Demetrius), but otherwise has gotten very little exposure (unfortunately, we use it for languages where there are currently no natives chez Tatoeba...)

If its use was formally encouraged for sentences a foreign translator was not, say, 95+% sure on, corrections afterwards would be much easier. Native speakers could just check all the tagged sentences in their respective languages, and go through with the checks when they had a chance.

"Too many sentences"

This could be solved with some optimization, but I don't know enough about coding to say how easy it would be to implement.

There could, for example, be a rating "tab" at the bottom of all Tatoeba pages that just showed a pair of sentences together and asked the user for an (optional) 1-10 rating. The pair of sentences would, of course, be in languages that the user has translated/linked the most pairs of sentences in. Again, could be messy to program, but this would neatly encourage ratings in an optimal fashion, rather than haphazardly (in which case, of course, there's too many sentences).

Also, the rating system wouldn't be on the individual sentences, would it, but on pairs (i.e. the links between the sentences)? That would cover both the quality of translation and the naturalness...