By its nature, Tatoeba leans towards short, complete utterances, even though such short sentences are obviously removed, in most cases, from a larger context. It is possible to construct scenes by assembling Tatoeba sentences into a defined order, and there are sometimes paragraph-long Tatoeba entries consisting of ten or more sentences, but these are frowned on as being unlikely to ever be tackled for translation. Also in such cases, we can run into a limit on the number of characters to be represented, and this can make a Tatoeba translation into certain languages impossible.

As a practical matter, I like to think of Tatoeba as a tool for the language learner and not as a comprehensive multilingual encyclopædia of all possible utterances. For me, in such a tool, sentences should be as short as possible while still conveying some meaning.

For me, a minimal sentence has a noun and a verb. Then there are transitive sentences with a direct and/or indirect object. A few well-chosen adjectives and adverbs add some spice, and then coordinate and subordinate conjunctions link related thoughts together. This works well for most European languages. Different structures are likely necessary for agglutinative languages, and I understand that North American Indigenous languages make use of a fourth-person pronoun on occasion.

Your contributions in Muscogee and Hitchiti will be valuable to Tatoeba, as I think we are unlikely to find a native speaker, which would have been ideal. I would suggest that you begin with the simplest of sentences which can be unambiguously represented in those languages and which are grammatically correct, even though they may convey only a little of the flavour of an Indigenous Knowledge Keeper , Elder or Matriarch relating the oral history from his or her ancestors.

With Kven, which I read but can not use fluently, I add simple sentences I am sufficiently certain of and then translate to Finnish, rather than trying to translate from other languages to Kven. Maybe this approach works for you, too - try to put in example sentences you have strong reasons to believe are correct, and then translate those to your native language(s).

As a bonus, you are likely to increase the diversity of the corpus by getting culture-specific sentences and not getting Tom everywhere.

Very interesting.
I think you are the best person to decide how to do it, and there isn’t much to be done wrong.
Tatoeba states that sentences should be natural sounding. If you feel that a "sentence" would be natural sounding within a specific context, it might be okay to add it that way even when the verb isn’t conjugated und the context isn’t known. If it sounds like „…have an idea and …“ and people would react „huh – and what?“, it would not be a suitable sentence.
The definition of sentence will vary between languages. If grammar requires that you always conjugate verbs, utterances without such a verb might not be considered full sentences. I unconjugated verbs are just normal, such a definition doesn’t make much sense. It’s true that Tatoeba sentences require a full stop, mostly because most languages require a full stop at the end of sentences. So for the sake of consistency and to avoid comments and questions, couldn’t you simply add full stops? I wonder if there is really a Muscogee rule saying you mustn’t use a full stop.

Sometimes one has to “make up” some extra information in the target language that is in the source language. For example, I heard some languages require that speakers choose between different verb forms indicating the degree of certainty. Since this information isn’t in an English sentence you need to decide yourself when translating.
So in your case, you could also add more than one possible translation and annotate it in the comment section, one as whole scene in the distant past and one as part of an (imaginary) scene.

It looks fine to me. Which menu are you looking at, and what are the problems you're seeing? Did you try clearing cookies for the site? Did you try another browser?

I've been using Tatoeba mostly on Firefox myself for years, and I'm using Firefox right now.

It's always been working well. Can you share some screenshots of your issues?

Is the Italian distinction similar to French «vous» and «tu»?

In English «you» is both polite and informal, as well as both singular and plural. A lot of sentences get translated into sentences with «you», and those tend to have many translations to other languages.

Writing it with a capital letter, as in «You», to signal politeness is not standard. See https://english.stackexchange.c...orm-of-writing .

Thanks for sharing this.