Our data is released under various Creative Commons licenses.More information
If you love this content, please consider a donation.
Wall (6,970 threads)
Tips
Before asking a question, make sure to read the FAQ.
We aim to maintain a healthy atmosphere for civilized discussions. Please read our rules against bad behavior.
Tighra_tlelli
5 hours ago
Wezel
yesterday
saverius
yesterday
sharptoothed
yesterday
small_snow
2 days ago
sharptoothed
4 days ago
CK
4 days ago
Pfirsichbaeumchen
6 days ago
Aidys
7 days ago
CK
7 days ago
How do I set the language I translate into?
If I click on "死ね" and try to add a translation, it comes up as German, while I mean it to be English, ...
for the moment (but we will change it soon) you have no way to directly specify the language
But, if Tatoeba misdetects the language, then you simply click on the flag next to the incriminate sentence and set it to the right one. It can be done whenever you want, as soon as the sentence belong to you (like editing)
Thanks. I tried clicking on the flag, I didn't realise I had to select the sentence first. I look forward to the new version where I can specify it at once.
BTW -- I seem to have added some rubbish (which I have marked with DELETE ME in the comments). Sorry.
ok no problem for the duplicate sentence, they will be automatically deleted, and an admin will deleted the other one
you could have direcly change the language on one of the sentence you've already added :p
Changed from ...
Another 'wish list' item. When looking at the log of recently changed items I would like to be able to see what changed items have been changed _FROM_.
Procedure when replacing (not correcting) sentences.
See http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/218263
If a sentence is pretty much completely replaced it's position in the "Sentence X is translation of Sentence Y" system may need to change.
Example:
BEFORE
Sentence A (Japanese) was (allegedly) translated into Sentence B (English) which was in turn translated into Sentence C (German)
AFTER
Japanese is noted to be unrelated to English and so completely replaced with a new Japanese sentence.
So _now_
Sentence B (English) is translated into
Sentence C (German) and also translated into
Sentence D (Japanese).
So A -> B -> C
changes to
B -> C
-> D
Here's a nice user-test for the system:
Sentence nº164914 was a Japanese sentence I wanted to edit. I edited its English translation, which went well, but because tatoeba.org responded too slow I accidentally added a new Japanese sentence (nº361150) instead of amending nº164914. I can't delete translations, so I just changed that old Japanese one to a Dutch translation of the sentence. Meanwhile, someone else added a German translation too! :)
Questions:
* What happens to the indices for the former Japanese sentence?
* Should user be able to do this?
As a developer I suspect that changing languages on an existing (Japanese) sentence is bound to cause issues, but as a user it makes perfect sense to solve the issue I ran into. Your thoughts?
> What happens to the indices for the former Japanese sentence?
As Paul said, it gets left behind. We don't have (yet) strong mechanisms that would help keep the database consistent.
> Should user be able to do this?
No, they shouldn't. Ideally, there should be guidelines (which I'm hoping to be able to write by the end of the month) to help users understand better how things work and how they can contribute in a way that doesn't give us (developers) more work than we already have ^^'
I wrote down some of the ideas in my comment here : http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/126
> Perhaps "nominate for deletion" could be added as explicit functionality?
Yes, in general, we could have various status for a sentence. Actually in the previous version of Tatoeba we used to have that, but I haven't re-implemented it. A sentence could be marked as "to delete", "checked" or "locked" (and perhaps other things, I don't remember). When a sentence was checked, it meant you could rely on it for not having mistakes. When it was locked, no one could edit it anymore.
But this is not urgent compared to other things we have to do. My priority at the moment is to make sure that people understand clearly that when they translate, they have to translate from the sentence written in big letters. I'm pretty sure that very often, people are adding translations to a Japanese sentence when they were actually translating from the English sentence.
We also have to enable people to link and unlink sentences. There are many sentences that are linked to each other without being translations of each other, and there are many sentences that could be translations of each other but are not linked to each other.
Once all of that is settled, and people understand that they have to view the corpus as a GRAPH and not a table, it will be less likely that they behave in a way that we don't want them to behave, like what you did. And perhaps "nominate for deletion" will not be *that* useful because instead of deleting, you could just edit your sentence into whatever you want and unlink it from any sentence it was linked to.
Educating users is desirable of course, but opportunistic contributors will make mistakes. In the case of incidental contributions, not being able to delete an entry that should not have been created, nor nominate it for deletion is likely to frustrate the user. An alternative may be to offer a grace period for sentences you created yourself, being able to delete them within a certain period as long as they are not linked to by other new sentences.
On the topic of linking translations: is it possible to link a sentence to multiple sentences? There are many cases where the translated sentences actually do function as proper translations of each other, as well the sentence they are linked to.
Visualizing the graph is challenging within the confines of HTML/CSS, good luck there. Further indenting of the non-direct translations might help.
> What happens to the indices for the former Japanese sentence?
It gets left behind. I manually copied it to the new sentence in this case, but Trang will need to clear up things. I'm not sure if I can delete index entries.
> Should user be able to do this?
It's probably a bad idea.
Suppose you have
A(English) translates to B(Japanese) translates to C(German)
If you change the Japanese to a new, Dutch, sentence you get
A(English) translates to B(Dutch) (doesn't really) translates to C(German)
Because C is really the translation of the (vanished) Japanese sentence not the (new) Dutch sentence.
I think it would have been best to have left the Japanese duplicate and added a "Please delete me" comment.
> I think it would have been best to have left the Japanese duplicate and added a "Please delete me" comment.
Agreed. (Since Tatoeba is in beta, I try to actively break things by using it from a novice user's perspective.)
Trang:
Perhaps "nominate for deletion" could be added as explicit functionality? A way for user's to flag a sentence as undesirable (with optional comment). In time the comment system will become hard to monitor for "delete me" type messages.
I do not appear to be able to change my password. Are passwords limited to a certain number of letters or something?
Okay should be fixed now.
It is. Thanks.
Paul, you're back! :O (Welcome back ^^)
I just tried to change my password and it worked... Passwords shouldn't be limited to a certain number of character, although I haven't tried anything above 20ish characters.
All I can tell you is to try again... Just be careful that there isn't any leading or trailing space if you're copy-pasting your "old" password.
Hmm, still doesn't seem to work.
One of the passwords I tried was 11 characters with 8 letters + 4 numbers. The other was 8 characters with six letters and two symbols.
Just tried with
testing123
(not a real password) and it didn't work.
I get the error message "An error occured while saving." each time.
I tried with testing123 too, but didn't get any error.
Well, perhaps you can try to log out and log in again. This will make sure that the password you were entering in "old password" is the right password. I mean, perhaps you were entering a password that you tought were your current password but actually isn't.
If it's not that, then for now I don't know what it is...
Actually, sysko made me realize that if the message is "An error occured while saving." and not "Password error. Please try again." then it means Tatoeba won't save your new password. I'm looking into this.
@Trang maybe it's related to the biptaste's bug, maybe it's not really closed
To my fellow German translators:
+5,000 sentences! (And about 1,000 sentences in 10 days, wow!) German is now #5! :D Let's have some cake.
Congratulations ^_^
Gratuliere!
And now, not only are there 6,500+ sentences, but German is also #4! =D
(but for how long...)
How do you edit the romaji line for Japanese sentences?
For now you don't :
http://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/index#message_24
As long as there isn't at least 2 or 3 "hardcore contributor" in Japanese, I will not implement the possibility to edit the romaji.
That's your decision. But do note that there are some very wrong romaji entries.
Don't worry, I'm very aware of this. I just think that people can wait to have 99,99% reliable romaji.
And there used to be a warning tooltip, when you moved your mouse over the romaji, that said it was not reliable... but you made me notice that it's not there anymore. I guess we took it out by mistake while cleaning our code.
You say that as if we are now at 99.98% accuracy. If you intend to have this project be a serious attempt for people to learn, please hide the Romaji if it's not going to be fixable. Currently, much of it is an abomination of on/kun mixups, and idiosyncratic spacing. Any beginners will just be confused by it, and anyone who knows how wrong it is will be frustrated by it. Also, what if a Japanese sentence is wrong? The romaji will be completely different, with added, subtracted, or moved words. If nothing else, add Romaji as a "Language". Long-term however, we're going to need some solution. I assume Chinese has the same issue, and Shanghainese likely does or will, too (I haven't seen any Shanghainese with ruby text yet). Eventually we'll be swimming in meta-languages. I'd say just nuke all romanization until it's done right. Also, doesn't wwwjdict already have every example sentence broken down into kana? I've used it in the past, but it was far too long ago for me to remember.
in fact chinese doesn't have the same issue
the problem with japanese romanization in tatoeba, is that it come from Kakasi, which is no longer a "living project", so we have no way to report the error to someone, as nobody maintain it anymore,
for chinese it comes from adso, develloped by the guy of popupchinese.com, I've regular contact with him, and as he have a strong background in both linguistic and programming, he's tool is really reliable and support by a reliable community
moreover when a bad romnization is found, a new version is released in the day most of the times
so for chinese there's no really problem
for shanghainese yep we will need to make it editable for the simple reason currently there's just no tool do this automatically :p (I'm working wit the adso guy to support shanghainese, but as I don't expect reliable result before a long time, I will make it editable)
for Japanese, I let Trang answers, as I don't speak japanese at all
Well, by "problem" I meant that the ruby can't be edited. So it does then? I understand that the mitigation of the problem is better for Chinese, but it's still read-only, correct? I also know that it's easier for Chinese, since the reading variations are more predictable, less common, and just plain easier to get right.
no it's not, and to be honnest i don't know if it's requested for chinese (for shanghainese absolutly it will need)
as I used adso also for other works than Tatoeba, and even in tatoeba, my chinese friends as not reported me yet a single sentence with a bad romanization, so I think letting people able to edit chinese will bring more drawbacks than advantages
* if a error is reported, i will notify it to adso guy, and waiting, the patch, we can add an hardcoded pinyin for the sentence
* if a chinese learner show a sentence where a chinese character has a very rare pronunciation, he will maybe correct it , thinking it's wrong, which is not intented
* the chinese romanization use characters with tones, and most of them cannot be input directly, neither with a IME
but after things are never stated for ever, and if we see the amount of errors from adso is too large to be covered by our current way of working, then we will make it editable
what do you think ?
(I only speak about shanghainese and chinese)
"Also, what if a Japanese sentence is wrong? The romaji will be completely different, with added, subtracted, or moved words."
I said this before I discovered where the romaji was coming from, forgot to go back and remove it before I posted, oops.
I've replied to Paul regarding the issue of romaji:
http://tatoeba.org/wall/index#message_223
> Also, doesn't wwwjdict already have every example sentence broken down into kana
Not exactly broken down into kana. It looks more like this: 誰も[01] が 私|1(わたし)[01] は|1 間違う{間違っている} と|1 言う{いった}
For this sentence: 誰もが私は間違っているといった。
But I know I could use this to make the romaji more reliable.
How are the tags used by WWWJDIC handled?
For example the following sentence should have a sense 1 tag on 誰も, but I don't see it in the edit sentence options.
http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/136692
If by "tags" you mean the indices, or "B line", then they are accessible from a special page. I'll send you the link in a private message, you can also ask Jim for more details.
If you are referring to the feature from the old version, that was using the indices to link words from the Japanese sentences to WWWJDIC, then I haven't had time to re-implement it yet.
Yes, I meant the "B line".
We could do with an option to show sentences in language X that do not have translations in language Y. (E.g. Japanese sentences with no English translation).
Yep we plan to do so, in fact we plan to add an "advance research panel" with this kind of research option
As an stop-gap measure how about creating a public list of sentences that need Japanese translating to English? That would let me get started contributing.
yep sure you can, anyway even with the capability to search sentence untraslated in language X, it's always better to directly have the possibility to see which sentences is reclaim by others,
(by the way some of our users used to post comment like "if someone could translate it in japanese it would be great", so the need is already there)
> yep sure you can.
I was sort of hinting that someone with admin access could produce such a list for me. ;-)
Someone with admin access has heard you and here is the list:
http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences_lists/show/24
(And I notice that some sentences in this list should be deleted)
As how translations relation works in Tatoeba it's not so obvious and I've explain it a lot of times, i post it here, waiting a better place
some of you have been puzzled by sentences which are disapearing etc...
that's come from the fact that a sentence has "translation" and "translation of translation"
and you always have a "main sentence" (at the top and bigger)
so to be a bit theoric
AA is a sentence, i add a translatio "BB"
now we have AA <----> BB
if i translate BB as CC
now we have
AA<--->BB<--->CC
so BB is a translation of AA
and CC a translation of translation AA (it will displayer a bit more gray when AA is the main sentence)
so now if translate CC by DD
we will have
AA<--->BB<--->CC <---->DD
and when clicking on sentence AA , DD will not appear, but when clicking on CC or DD it will
why?
in fact you know that when you translate, even how good you are in translation, due to language/cultural limitation/difference, we can't have a 100% exact meaning (for example in english you have only "they" but in france you can translate it by "elles" (female) or "ils" (male)
so
Ils <--> they <---> elles <---> etc.
as you can see "ils" and "elles" are both correct translation of "they" but they have not the same meaning, that's why we need when "ils" is the main sentence, to say "hey elle is an undirect translation meaning is likely to be a bit different but still enough near to help you"
so now you can imagine with complex sentences, translation of translationf of translation etc.. are really likely to be totally different, so that's why we don't display them
that's why it's important to only translate sentences in the language you know, not translate it because it has a translation you know the meaning of
anyway in the next update of tatoeba we will review a bit the way it's displayed in order to make it more obvious
so that's globally why somes translations dissapear depending of which is the main sentences and why it's important to have the right main sentence
(I Hope i was not too long)
feel free to ask questions, I know I'm not really good for explanating :$