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Tighra_tlelli
an hour ago
Wezel
yesterday
saverius
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sharptoothed
yesterday
small_snow
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sharptoothed
4 days ago
CK
4 days ago
Pfirsichbaeumchen
6 days ago
Aidys
6 days ago
CK
6 days ago
Here's another suggestion.
There's some space on the right hand side of the 'home' page. I suggest you use it to show the most recent posts in the 'Wall'. Probably best if you just show the first line or two and make it a link to the #-anchor of the message in question.
Simple suggestion.
In a break from the difficult and / or controversial suggestions I have one simple one to offer.
I suggest that the sentence list pages (e.g.
http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences_lists/edit/24
) should use their description as their page title (e.g.
Sentence lists: jpn->eng translations needed
instead of just
Sentence lists
)
Seriously - romaji editing now. ;-)
I don't think there's any point in waiting for "a serious Japanese contributor". Most of the romaji errors are very obvious and either I, or half a dozen or so regulars here, would be well able to correct them if they had the chance.
I would go as far as to say that it would be better not to have romaji AT ALL rather than leave them in the current state.
Then it may be no romaji at all... But I want opinion from more users first. Is it better to have no romaji at all, or is it better to have something even if it's not 100% correct?
I know Nemo is against romaji as well, but if I have added it, it was because more than two people had requested it in the past.
Regarding editable romaji, I'd rather avoid having people to waste time on correcting romaji which is why I don't want to make it editable.
Most of the time it's a systematic error that can be found in more than 100 other sentences. If I made romaji editable, you'd have to edit them one by one.
You'd also have to make sure everyone agrees on the romanization rules and follows them, which is again more work.
I think it's better to improve the software (not necessarily KAKASI) to the point where it can't get any better. It would save time for so many other people in the world...
Perhaps there is someone out there who is actively developing an open source Japanese parser and furgina-romaji converter. I haven't had time to search, but if you do find one (and by "you" I mean anyone who is reading this), by all means, let me know.
> I'd rather avoid having people to waste time on
> correcting romaji which is why I don't want to make
> it editable.
That's basically another way of saying that the romaji isn't important. If the romaji isn't important I'd rather it wasn't there than be there and often incorrect. ;-)
Having a kana version or furigana would be a nice alternative. kana would get rid of the
o / wo
e / he
wa / ha
confusion. Note that a combination of Edict and the Index information could be used to generate pretty-much-correct furigana or kana. (Not that easy, but doable)
I agree with Paul that furigana might me preferable to broken rōmaji. Learning the basics of kana shouldn't take you more than a month or two, after that, kanji readings become the hard part. Furigana should, in my opinion, eliminate the need for rōmaji for learners of Japanese.
Rōmaji is mostly useful for transcribing Japanese for a public that cannot read any Japanese at all. Also, the rōmaji generated by Kakasi is wāpuro-rōmaji.
I'm for having all the romaji on the site be accurate. If the best way to do that is deleting all of the romaji, then I'd say do that. If you really want an accurate romaji representation, it will probably need to be written ad hoc. I don't think this should be too hard though, so long as it is written for this project specifically, and it is done soon. This site is currently comprised mostly of the Tanaka Corpus, so far as I am aware, so almost every word in the Japanese examples should be also present in EDICT, which has the reading of every word in it in kana. If there are multiple readings, I would just make the output something like:
僕は市場へ行った
*** boku wa (shijyou | ichiba) e itta
So that the edge cases could be fixed. It's still a lot of work, but it's doable. (In this case, the difference is irrelevant, but in many it could be relevant). You could then dump the database into a text file of all beginning with ***. I believe EDICT even has the readings listed in order of frequency, so if you wanted to you could have it just guess the first one every time, and fixing the few that got put in incorrectly would not be a huge ordeal. I would recommend keeping some automatic conversion in place, and storing things in the database as:
僕は市場へ行った
ぼくはしじょうへいった
and having the conversion take place from the kana to romaji on-the-fly. Also, force those editing the romaji to use kana. Basically introduce a learning curve that will discourage those who don't know better from thinking they do. Also, changes in romanization could be implemented very easily. I personally use wapuro romaji whenever I do, which is rare still, but I know this is less than ideal for learning.
My whole post is a waste of time, lol. The software you are using has an output to kana mode, which would not be subject to the pitfalls that romaji is. I suggest we use that. Kana is not that difficult to learn, and there's no sense in learning grammar/sentences before kana anyway.
We need post editing, haha. JUMAN does exactly what you need. It converts from kanji to hiragana, and labels each word with what it is. So, if it says は is a 助詞 (particle), you can output wa, and the same for all of the others. I'm not sure that it outputs romaji (The sample set-up does not), but with kana and part of speech, romaji is just a lookup table away.
May I disturb the silence once again. Consider the situation where somebody translates sentence A into B, then somebody later comes along to translate B into C. It then turns out that B is wrong and is consecutively changed. This invalidates C. Any ideas/plans for that?
Part of the answer is in the comment I wrote here:
http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/126
And in my todo list for the weekend: write some guideline so that users know how contribute correctly.
Thx to both of you. I see the whole system is well thought-out.
this have already been discussed ^^
soon, we will add an unlink feature, so you will be able to say "these sentence are no longer translations to each other"
so what to do in your case
in fact you're not supposed to change the B sentence, as long as the sentence is by itself correct, because as you've said, it will make translation of B erroneous too
so you just add a B2 sentence and add a note that the B sentence will need to be unlink to A sentence
Finding contributors (to the code): Why don't you guys (& girls) share (i.e. open source) your site's code on say github? First that would make this a truly "open source" project, and secondly people could help add features. Think about it.
Some guys here seem pretty eager to get their features implemented ;)
Like sysko said, we are actually open source. The reason why it's not promoted anywhere is because:
1) The code hasn't met my standards of elegance yet... Still too many parts that make me cringe when I look at them.
2) We still don't have a sound methodoly and organization in our way of working and I really don't have time to manage more people ^^'
(we're in PHP though, sorry :P)
Good enough. Desolé for the PHP part, but then it's self-inflicted :)
Something this thread brings up, the user interface should be stored in a cookie, not as part of the URL. French is easy enough, but what if I click http://tatoeba.org/chi/sentences/show/366507/ and I'm new and/or don't read Chinese? I'm stuck and have to go back, close the window, or start over at the main page. Quick and Dirty fix would be change all of the languages to something like "English - English; Francais - French; zhongwen - Chinese; nihongo - Japanese" etc. (Not suggesting they be romanized, I just don't feel like dealing with my IME.) Not trying to be Anglocentric, but most people can decipher language names in English.
it is stored in the session,
moreover at the top of each pages you have a menu to change the language interface ;-) with the name of each language in it's own way (français,english, 中文 ...) and when changing it reload the page with the new language, and change the language of your session
and all new pages you want to show will be displayed in this language
My point is, not everyone knows Chinese/Japanese. In fact the vast majority cannot read a single character. So they arrive at a page, seeing "中文" at the top is of little or no help, nor is "日本語". It's not a problem for you, not a problem for me, but sit some random people down at the page at tell them to navigate it.
ok, agree, will see to make it clearer :)
In fact the code is already available on a svn public repository (with read only access and a AGPL licence (I'm a bit FOSS fanatic), but I don't think we're against code contributors, so write access can be granted for motivated code-contributors)
after why it's not explicity written somewhere on the website, hmm I think (Trang has maybe much relevant reason than me) it's because the project lacks documentation and is in a rewriting / cleaning phase, so we prefer to show a pretty reviewed code ^^
but if you want to take a look, I can give you the repo in private message
Wrt link to repo: depends on the language. I ain't touching PHP :p
it's PHP :p
Hehe, to be honnest the use of PHP is more about an historical choice ( i would like python too :p)
Change Request
For the 'wish list' I would like to suggest a couple of features.
1. People who don't own a sentence can click an icon (check a checkbox) when posting a comment to make it an official request to change a sentence.
2. Add an extra line to the "Your Links" section of the profile.
* View all my sentences
* View sentences with change requests
* View my favorite sentences
* Sentences with undetected language
Reason:
It is too easy for sentence owners to miss comments. For example I suspect fcbond hasn't noticed the comment I made in the following link.
http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/79465
Maybe that's a bit too complicated. At least there are several other feature requests in the pipe, that might have more impact.
As you indicated in the 2nd note already though, adding a "news feed" for requests on one's sentences is surely needed.
I would propose to change your request into something with a broadend scope: "disown request" to disown sb by taking over their sentence. This could also be used on inactive users. Some time without reaction *zing* you go ahead.
I also was considering recommending a way of taking over neglected sentences, but I considered the 'change request' to be a less controversial idea. After all not everybody who's away for a month or two has actually given up.
maybe in a more general way, we can make something "a la twitter", I mean, when you want a comment to be notify to someone, you just @userNickName, and maybe add a "feed" section in the profile
anyway in future release we plan to review a bit the architecture, add some category in the profile, and make your profile a more central page
what do you think ?
PS: for disowning, I will see with Trang how she planned to handle it (we used to talk about that, but i've a weak memory :( )
The way I envision it is not really "disowning", it's more about finding a better owner if the current owner doesn't do his job (kind of like, if you're a bad parent, your kids are taken away).
But I still don't know what would be the best solution because we don't really have a real need for that yet. I mean, it's not very frequent that you'd want to disown someone from his/her sentences. Which means it's not an urgent feature either.
Normally he fcbond should have received a notfication when you commented his sentence, but the notification system was broken :'( ...about 100 notifications that should have been sent but weren't, *sigh*.
Anyway, having a link to a page that lists the comments posted on your sentences is something I should have done a long time ago... When I decided to integrate an "ownership/adoption" system in replacement of the moderation system we used to have, it was obvious that users should be able to quickly access comments on their sentences.
But I think that having a checkbox would be add unnecessary complexity. People will usually read all the comments on their sentences, so there's no need to filter out specifically those that require a correction.
+1 feature request:
Tag sentences for a special form. Say your language has several possible translations for a given sentence, tag these sentences for the given feature. Example: http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/366466 I would add one for informal you (french 'tu') and one for formal you (french 'vous').
A wiki would be nice to list those feature request, I think this "Wall" might get a bit to muddled.
+1 for the wiki, in fact it's already in the todo list (in fact as for the code, we've also a ticket system for developper)
and you're true it can be great as someone has already talked about tagging
http://tatoeba.org/fre/wall/index#message_200
:p
I was kinda thinking a PHPbb install or a Google Group would be effective. I'd limit access though.
Even if it's written in the terms of use, which is supposed to be accepted by everyone who contribute
it is FORBIDDEN to add sentence which come from books / dictionaries, for the simple reason it does not belong to you, and by the way, you can't deliver them under a CC-BY licence
thanks to take care
What about books that are out of copyright?
no problem if they're in the public domain, even if sometimes it's hard to say, espcially for book which are in public domain after its author death, as the period change from a country to another
but yep, no problem for copyright-free books, or for books you've written yourself, or for those the author give you the right to use extract in Tatoeba :)
I take it, though, that you can't use "Fair use exemption" ?
I understand that whether fair use is included in copyright law depends on the country in question. (Japan doesn't, yet, but might soon http://www.cartoonleap.com/2009...nciplefinally/ )
Whether fair use applies also depends on a number of other factors (US case http://www.masters.edu/DeptPage...4&minimal=true )
for the "fair use", it will not say an absolute "NO, we can't". Because for example France, even without the "fair use" notion, authorize to make small quote of books as soon as the quotation is justified by the scientific, pedagogic information they provide to the work they're incorporated in. But after as we have no lawyer in the team, and to be honnest, other works we find more important to do than to check if we can have a safe "fair use".
Moreover I think it's better in a first time to say "no, no quotes from copyrighted books", to avoid quote from books which can not be considered as a "fair use", rather than playing with fire.
But one day, when Tatoeba will be quite near complete in feature (i.e when we will not have dozen of feature request to code and bugs to fix ^^), I try to see if it's possible or not, and then give you a clear and absolute answer.
so my answer "for the moment we will considered we can't"
Fair enough.
A->B or B->A
There doesn't seem to be an easy way to tell whether a pair of sentences are
A(Japanese) translated to B(English)
or
B(English) translated to A(Japanese)
I would like to make sure this feature is firmly placed in the wish list for future development.
Is there a specific case where you would need this information?
One not too difficult way is to look at the creation date of each sentence (which you can see in the first entry in the logs). If A was created before B, then it must have been A->B.
> Is there a specific case where you would need this information?
Not as such, but I can explain _why_ I want this information to be recorded / displayed.
One common use of the translated example sentences is to explain what the original sentence means. So it is quite normal to have, for example, obscure English translated (explained) into normal Japanese.
Imagine you have this:
http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/270663
A. Many a mickle makes a muckle. [Proverb]
B. 塵も積もれば山となる。
B is the Japanese equivalent (and 'translation') of A.
Some well meaning person might decide that hardly anybody knows what "Many a mickle makes a muckle." means and 'correct' it into a different English sentence.
A more common example would be the
http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/71044
A. I'll make you a present of a doll.
B. あなたに人形をお贈りします。
If B. is the original and A. the translation then you could well say that the English in A is a little odd and should be changed. If A is the original and B is the translation then you could say that the A demonstrates a somewhat old-fashioned phrasing and B explains is.
In those cases it would be desirable to have both phrasings, with uncommon ones marked somehow, so users should be encouraged to add alternate translations rather than 'correcting' existing ones when the translation is not erroneous.
I think this could be handled by attaching more metadata to sentences. Properties like masculine/feminine, proverb, quotation, polite, slang, dated, etc. could be tagged onto a single sentence, so you could have e.g. both a polite and a colloquial translation, and mark them as such.
That would also address the problem where sentences from the Tanaka Corpus are currently marked with tags like [F] on the English sentence, even though the property belongs to the Japanese sentence. That doesn't work that well when the sentences aren't restricted to pairs.
Which languages to add, and which not to add.
Just a short note to say that Wikipedia adopted the policy to only create Wikipedias for languages that have an ISO 639-3 Code. There might be exceptions. I think this decision helped them pretty much ease the process for new languages.
Yep we used to have a discussion about that, and we don't plan to only add languages which have an ISO 639 alpha 3 code, wikipedia as to do this because they have tons of contributors, and an encyclopedia need much more data than just a database of example sentences, so I can understand why they don't prefer to have a lot of articles rather than a lot of dialects or so
but for us, I think as soon as the language is enough different to be not totaly intelligible with an other, then we can add it as a specific language (that's the case for shanghainese for example, the closest ISO 639 code is for Wu language, but the Wu language, for which shanghainese is a "dialect", is divided in some other "dialects" (even i don't really like the word "dialect"), which are not intelligible with shanghainese)
and as I think tatoeba can be used to keep a trace of language, especially endangered ones, I would find really pityfull to not add a small language, only because it has no iso 639-3 code (moreover I've heard iso 639-4 code will be released)