> A gigantic waste of time

Are you joking, or are you seriously critizing sysko? Because I don't think this is a fair argument to criticize by.

You could also say things like "if everyone gave a dollar a day to such and such charity, starvation in such and such country would not be a problem". And it'd be true (maybe), and you could make similar arguments for lots of situations. But sysko isn't a machine, and I don't think he thought of optimizing Tatoeba to within 1% global accuracy when he coded it.

In short: Thanks for all the work, sysko. I don't think 13,000 duplicates is as catastrophic as some people are making them out to be. We waste many more minutes each day on far less productive things. "Work thrown away"? Not at all.

Actually, even if we assume that all 4 (!) Faroese sentences are linked to one another, and that all the other languages have no self-links, it's still going to win by a landslide.

Go, go, Faroese!

> since many contributors tend to translate on the fly from the log, Asiatics tend to translate Asiatics more, Americans, Amercians, and so on...

I don't know what statistical evidence you're basing this on, but that's not how I translate. And I don't think that's how you translate either. But maybe you're right.

Actually, this is a pain... I forgot that the languages are not in the same order as by sentence quantity.

I'll just give the simplified version below:

Esperanto: 1.72
English: 2.49
Faroese: 11.25

Faroese >> all

Case closed.

I'll just go and do it.

And I'll make sure English doesn't end up #1.

Yes, but how does all that relate to what languages people choose to translate to and from?

If Chinese contributors only translate from English, it isn't going to change the ratio whether there's 5 of them or 500...

Anyway, we need a neutral party to look at this. Zifre's clearly an Imperialist, so any list he provides will inevitably have English on top.

I found a flaw in your proof:

Average links per language is robust (yes, "robust") against all these biases you talk off. The only biases come from the users themselves, I think. A biased sample would probably have one user who could link and knew several languages. But there's no way to really control that.

We should have Swift scan the whole database.

> The proof it was irrelevant was in the pudding...Look at the numbers that were published: They're completely contradictory.

Q.E.D. (?)

Tellin' ya, the future is written in Latin...

I'm just curious:

What would a "relevant sample" be, technically, in this case? Isn't a purely random sample relevant?

Oh, this one. Well, you can just divide each one by the number of sentences in that language, can't you? Does Esperanto win if you do that?

But he DIDN'T position English on top. I think it's been concluded that the language of the future is Latin.

bug: the kept sentence appears twice in the link list

But there are a few here, I think. Let me rephrase to "professional translators who don't see TTB as unfair competition".

Call me curious, but...

How many professional translators (who are paid for their translating) are there on this website? It might be good to have a directory of such people (if they're willing to be included, of course) so as to know whose opinion to refer to on questionable matters, difficult translations, etc...

@U2FS: Malheureusement, on ne peut pas lutter contre le fait que des gens deux fois plus âgés que nous ont plus d'expérience. C'est très simple et vrai. Donc, il faut montrer du respect vers quelqu'un de 49 ans, même si tu n'es pas d'accord avec lui. Là, je suis d'accord avec sacredceltic (même si ce n'est pas le cas d'habitude...) Il est également vrai que quelqu'un avec deux langues natales est, en général, désavantagé par rapport à quelqu'un qui n'en a qu'une.

Mais c'est vrai que, en ce qui concerne la logique, on peut lutter contre n'importe quoi :-)

Donc, je vous laisse les deux.

http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/519654

Untranslated to this day.

+1

This is pretty abstract, but in unrelated languages the structure is more block-by-block than word-by-word, I would say. Although there are some cases where word-by-word nails it (e.g. 好久不见 and "long time no see").

I think I see what BraveSentry is saying, and I agree. Given naturalness of sentence 1 == naturalness of sentence 2 and meaning of 1 == meaning of 2, the next criterion to decide which is better is heavily linked to similarity of sentence structure/rhythm/style (where word-for-word has an automatic advantage).

Oui, ce n'est pas un système très... robuste !