What an interesting page, @CK — so comprehensive and thought-provoking. Thank you for setting up the page for me; I'm going to have lots of fun experimenting with the many options you provided. I'm really ferklempt.

Instead of automatically showing "Latest Contributions" on the main Tatoeba landing page — which often seems to me to be a haphazard collection of sentences contributed in a language other than the five or so I can more or less understand (but which may nevertheless be useful for many other Tatoebans) — it might be a worthwhile idea to allow users to configure the box so that it would present, say, "Latest contributions in English" or "La plej lastaj Esperantaj kontribuoj" — i.e., in languages with which that individual user is familiar and is comfortable translating from.

Perhaps it could even be populated automatically by picking the language, from the user profile, which that user has indicated is his or her second strongest language. For example, if a user's main language is English but the user has a slightly lower command of Norwegian, the user could be shown an array of Norwegian sentences.

If the user put five stars beside his command of English and four stars for each of Norwegian, Swedish and Danish and only three stars for Icelandic, he could be shown a box with three sentences each in the Scandinavian languages and one in Icelandic, perhaps.

It's just an idea that occurred to me, and I don't know how difficult it might be to implement, or even if other Tatoebans might find such an approach to be useful to them as well.

When I contributed a few audio recording files a few years back, CK very helpfully sent me some directions for most effectively using the free Audacity recording software, which can be downloaded in your choice of Linux, Macintosh and Windows versions. He also indicated that it would be best to make a mention on one's Tatoeba user page that all of her/his recordings are CC-released.

Here is a helpful page about contributing audio files to Tatoeba:
https://en.wiki.tatoeba.org/art...tribute-audio2

This includes the helpful suggestion that you initially record only a few sentences so that Tatoeba admins can confirm the quality is sufficiently good.

Some specific information for using Audacity:
http://www.manythings.org/tatoeba/audacity.html

Feliĉan naskiĝtagon, Lisa! Mi tre ŝatas viajn frazhelpon kaj proponojn, kaj mi esperas ke vi ĝuos kaj la tagon kaj la tutan jaron.

Internet Explorer is deprecated now. It's better to use a standards-compliant browser like Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari or Opera. Even Microsoft's current product, Edge, is far better than Internet Explorer, which is no longer under development. Try viewing this and other sites in a more modern browser, and see if your particular problem with the Tatoeba site disappears. Good luck.

Congratulations, CK. That's a marvellous and unstintingly generous contribution, for which the entire Tatoeba community thanks you.

Occasionally I come across a large block of text at Tatoeba which does have unity and is on a single topic but which is very, very long, such as #2015938. Were such monolithic text blocks to be broken up into groups of 1 or 2 sentences each, I believe it would much facilitate the comparison to equivalent sentences in other languages.

It might not be good to have a hard maximum character limit for sentences at Tatoeba — and we would not want to have some older Tatoeba record entries deleted just because they exceeded some maximum length to be determined. But perhaps a flag could be set whenever a user attempts to enter more than, say, 256 characters. The flag could perhaps generate a prompt suggesting: “Please consider dividing this entry into individual sentences or at least smaller groups of sentences."

Moi aussi. Ankaŭ mi. :-)

WIth all possible respect, @sacredceltic, I don't think it's all that heated, or even really a debate.

I accept @sabretou's observation as to which term — क्रिसमस, krisamas, or नाताळ, nātāḷ — is currently most in use within the Marathi-language community for this imported holiday. Joyeux Noël.

> (The Marathi word for 'Christmas' comes from Portuguese, nātāḷ) :)

That is not really suprising, @sabretou, given that Portugal for over 400 years occupied the three colonial enclaves Goa, Damão and Diu, and that Goa borders Maharashtra. Where else but from Portuguese would Marathi have got a name for an originally Christian festival?

Perhaps a better translation of the desired concept would be "korpusa bontenanto".

A rough English version of @Thanuir's Finnish remarks:

> You can remove words which you yourself have added to the vocabulary.
> At this time, inaccuracies and stupidities cannot be removed from the list.
> There are some practical suggestions on my profile.

Thank you, Thanuir, for your helpful comments and for the very helpful guidance on your profile page, at <https://tatoeba.org/eng/user/profile/Thanuir>, for contributing sentences based on proposed vocabulary items that are currently rare in the Tatoeba sentence database. Kiitos.

I had a very brief look at the list of vocabulary words for which sentences are desired. When restricted to English words only, it nevertheless had a few anomalies.

1. ‹Lautgesetzlich›, clearly a German word, is mislabelled as English.

2. ‹thunderstrock› is misspelled; it should be ‹thunderstruck›.

3. ‹щзхлзщхлщзх›, being written in Cyrillic letters, cannot be English. Perhaps it is Russian or Bulgarian, but my guess is that it may be a nonsense word, as I do not see any vowels. Can it even be pronounced?

Jeg gratulerer deg med avtalen din. Mi gratulas vin pri via nomumo. I congratulate you on your appointment.

"Critiques," ou "Commentaires", peut-être?

It's correct English; the punctuation is not quite right, though. There should be no space before the period at the end.

Since English may not be your strongest language, I suggest that for future Tatoeba volunteer work, it might be best for you to create good sentences in your mother tongue and to translate other people's English sentences into your native language. Good luck. I hope you can make some valuable contributions to Tatoeba.

Thank you, #TRANG, for an interesting and thoughtful answer. Ultimately, I will follow whatever policies Tatoeba lays out, as I think the concept and its (inevitably less than perfect) execution are highly worthy efforts in their own right. Recognizing that we have limited programming staff (basically yourself, plus any donated help from things like Google Summer of Code), I had assumed that constructing parsers and part-of-speech taggers was beyond the scope of what was possible. However, if it is indeed feasible, yours would seem to be the most elegant solution. Good luck on these ambitious projects.

Excellent! +1

This might just satisfy everyone who contributes to Tatoeba, providing it is technically feasible.

Thanks, @AlanF_US, for kindly posting the link to @CK's complete list of Wildcards, i.e., the names he uses and recommends to others, like Tom, Mary, Boston, Australia, Park Street, etc. I had not seen this full list before, but having seen it, I am now thoroughly convinced of the great benefit of using a single set of names for the basic Tatoeba corpus. In the right column of that page, http://a4esl.org/temporary/tato...ildcards.html, there are links to three marvellous JQuery demostrations that show how easy it can be to perform automatic substitutions on the corpus, so that, for instance, every instance of 'Tom' can be instantaneously replaced with 'Fadil' (or 'Sami', or anything else). One would only need to modify the JQuery code to perform the desired replacement.

I know that @TRANG is super-busy with coding the wonderful overall Tatoba platform, but it might not be too far-fetched to imagine the creation of a number of similar substitution routines which could be user-selected from a drop-down menu. Someone who wants to translate a selection of Tatoeba English sentences to French, Tagalog or Swahili or whatever could then apply the same JQuery routine to the Tatoeba equivalents to create derivative French, Tagalog or Swahili entries linked to the English versions that use her choice of alternative names. From the one master Creative Commons database, users could create, for example, a smaller open-source bilingual corpus using their choice of substitutes for the wildcards.

Doing this sort of automatic one-to-one substitution is far easier than trying to recreate a vast number of nearly identical sentences but having to search for random names instead of a small canonical set of fixed size. Admittedly, translators into slavic languages will need to implement some sort of grammar parser so that they can determine the role of Tom, Mary and Boston in each individuial sentence in order to provide correct case endings. This is a difficult task but not an insurmountable one.

Here's a delightful example showing how easily actor names and language names can be changed, provided we start with the basic wildcards; I found the demo very compelling: http://a4esl.org/temporary/tato...eas/wildcards/

Let's not mess with a good thing. What CK has provided the Tatoeba volunteer community, in addition to his astonishing contribution of nearly 570,000 sentences, is a practical mechanism to minimize duplications and chaos and to maximize utility, both actual and potential. I believe that we should formalize CK's recommendations as an official Tatoeba recommendation.