Your sentence was not added because the following already exists.
「彼らは彼に」って自然な発話で使いますか？
できれば普通名詞を入るのがより自然です。
名詞を入れるか、何も言わないか、ですよね。西洋語のアナファーは「ゼロ代名詞」(?)に対応することの方が多い気もします。
Didn't they [Tom and Mary] ask Mr. Miller?
They asked him, but he didn't answer.
（彼ラハ）ミラー先生に聞かなかったの？
（彼ラハ）（彼ニ）聞いたけど（彼ハ）答えてくれなかったんだって。
個人的には代名詞の多い文は触らないことにしています。この文を「聞いた。」と訳すのが有意義とも思えませんし。
言語によって訳していい文と訳さない方がいい文とがあります。訳されない方がよかった文は野良のままにしておけばいいでしょう。
学習者が特に目上の人を「彼」「彼女」呼ばわりするのを聞くとヒヤヒヤします。そういう体験お持ちではありませんか？
@ Kalamunda
I can add, if you know another languages besides English if would be even more helpful to translate from them to Japanese. It's because there are many people who can translate English sentences, but much less people who can translate Spanish sentence, for example. So, many original non-English sentences still don't have any translations.
No worries.
I just want to fix Japanese sentences with wrong translation linked to English. Unnatural sentences are bad, but wrong linkages may be even worse for the students.
Having said this, I believe tommy_san is right in his opinion to refrain from creating/modifying Japanese, under the given circumstances, if there is little chance of making natural sentences. Sentence #195538 fits into that category.
I would suggest in this case, we ask moderators to delete, not just unlink. These sentences probably will serve no purpose and may result in additional unnatural translations if left in the database.
Any thoughts?
Just one more thought.
I know popular iOS applications such as Imiwa? display those unadopted sentence pairs. Some of them are even treated as 'certified' in Imiwa?. Sentence #221282 is such an example. I wonder if tatoeba project publishes any data quality guidelines to the apps developers. Do you know?
Imiwa just takes the first result found on this page.
Don't trust the examples displayed by Imiwa.
But the dictionary function does its job, I would say.
It's not so easy to delete a sentence unless it's definitely wrong. Neither the original nor the current version of this sentence is wrong, they just sound somewhat unnatural. There are hundreds of thousands of sentences like these. Some people want to keep them, especially it's the only example of a certain word. They think it's better to have stilted examples than to have no examples, and keep spreading loads of unnatural Japanese sentences. And they're devastatingly influential. I hate it and have protested repetedly, but I couldn't change anything. It's simply too unconvincing when a youngster says "I kind of feel this is not what we'd say."
So far, I've been just ignoring the sentences I don't like. Sometimes, when I find a mistake, I correct it and keep it unowned. This means that I still don't really like the sentence even after the correction.
I've also started to sort sentences into five lists, as I've already told you in a private message.
http://tatoeba.org/jpn/sentences_lists/show/3185
http://tatoeba.org/jpn/sentences_lists/show/3514
http://tatoeba.org/jpn/sentences_lists/show/3515
http://tatoeba.org/jpn/sentences_lists/show/3516
http://tatoeba.org/jpn/sentences_lists/show/3517
These might help somehow in the future.
It's been discussed that maybe we'll stop exporting "orphan" sentences.
http://tatoeba.org/jpn/wall/sho...#message_19439
This way, other sites and apps wouldn't use unowned sentences anymore. But I fear they might keep using old data, since they'd lose lots of vocabulary if they'd use new data.
By the way, I found out where this sentence pair come from.
It's from the Gospel of John, 1:21. The original Japanese was taken from the 新改訳聖書, so it's a sentence found in a real Japanese book and read by a lot of people.
http://www.yawill.com/viewbook....g2=ja&acts=add
