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Tatoeba, Multilingual Sentences Database | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Links & Internet Resources |  | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6016 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 9 of 16 18 April 2011 at 5:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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To make a link clickable, type [url] before it and [/url] after it. This also stops a space being added. To see this how this looks in practice, quote this message and look at the source of the following:
http://blog.tatoeba.org/2010/02/how-to-be-good-contributor-i n-tatoeba.html http://blog.tatoeba.org/2009/11/how-can-tatoeba-be-useful-fo r-language.html http://blog.tatoeba.org/2010/09/warning-you-are-being-disres pectful.html http://blog.tatoeba.org/2011/01/legally-valid-content.html 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6016 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 10 of 16 18 April 2011 at 7:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've just had a look at the site, and done my best to break it.
While the goal is noble and I think that I will find the site very useful, the methods are flawed. The idea that getting a chain of people to translate from various languages to various other languages gives an equivalence in all language pairs just isn't true. In fact, translating one way doesn't even guarantee an accurate translation back the way. For example, someone requested translations for I'm sorry, I don't buzz in people I don't know. For those of you that don't understand, you "buzz someone in" when you live in a flat (apartment) with an electronic entryphone system. You speak to them, you press a button, there's a buzzing sound, they come in. "Buzz someone in". There's three translations just now (two French alternatives and one German) and all 3 translate the general sense of letting someone in. The French and German ones can be used face-to-face (maybe you've got a job as a doorman), and as the colloquial "buzz in" may well not be included in your dictionary, you might not realise it's wrong. In this example we've only got one stage of error, but as we cross languages, there is a possibility of a slow change of meaning, Chinese whispers style. For those of us who know enough about languages to know what to look out for, it will no doubt be useful, but it's likely to lead a few uninformed learners astray.... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5278 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 11 of 16 19 April 2011 at 5:01am | IP Logged | |||||
I sent you a PM but your mailbox is full and so it won't receive it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Baudelaire Triglot Newbie France tatoeba.org Joined 6111 days ago 30 posts - 32 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishB2, Mandarin Studies: Latin, Shanghainese | Message 12 of 16 19 April 2011 at 6:25am | IP Logged | |||||
Actually that's not the idea of the website http://tatoeba.org/fre/faq#indirect-translations When you translate you only translate the sentence at the top, and then it will create in the database a direct link, so let's take an example we have the sentence A translated by B and C which means that internally you have B ==== A ====C you arrive and you see on the website the following C =>(green) A =>(grey) B because B is an indirect translation of C, so it is purposely represented differently to warn that it is not a direct translation so it's likely to have some difference in the meaning (the top sentence is just an arbitry one, you can change it to B by clicking on B) if you translate C by D you will have B ==== A ====C === D and if we position D at the main sentence you will see D => (green) C => (grey) A and not B because we consider B as too far away, because we know that after some successiv translation the meaning will be too different (actually this is also a database limitation) so as a given moment you will see all the direct translation, so people who have translated this specific sentence (or the opposite, it's true we don't make the difference) in green, all the translation of these translation in grey After we admit it's not the most obvious thing at first 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6016 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 13 of 16 19 April 2011 at 4:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
Fair enough, but that's what the introductory video seems to suggest.
Unfortunately, though, it seems to be a two-way link. Your green links suggest that A is completely logically equivalent to B, that either can translate to the other Sticking with my previous example (shortened for ease of reference), I don't buzz in people I don't know translates to je n'admets pas les gens que je ne connais pas. This is OK. But once I click on the French version, I get a green link back to I don't buzz in people I don't know. A grey link I could accept, but the green link implies that it is correct, but if I was asked to translate je n'admets pas les gens que je ne connais pas to English, I would give I don't let in people I don't know or I don't let people in if I don't know them. If the system encoded links with directionality, then people could translate back and forward until a state of equilibrium was reached, where several links became equivalent both ways. Right now, I'm trying to link a sentence to two different sentences, and I can't see how. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Baudelaire Triglot Newbie France tatoeba.org Joined 6111 days ago 30 posts - 32 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishB2, Mandarin Studies: Latin, Shanghainese | Message 14 of 16 19 April 2011 at 5:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
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for the moment, only "trusted-user" can link sentences, but when we will have coded easy to revert wrong/accidentaly-made unlinking, we will open the feature to everyone, for the moment we keep it to user that has used tatoeba quite a while and seems to understand the principle of indirect translation etc.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6016 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 15 of 16 19 April 2011 at 8:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
OK, how do I prove myself quickly then? I'd like to contribute, but I does feel pointless to me translating from one language when I can see that my sentence is a good match for 3 or 4 other translations and can't do anything about it. Also, is there currently any mechanism in place to modify a link when one of the items has changed? Say I see: Je viens a le voir and I translate it as I'm coming to see him but then someone spots a mistake in the original and changes it to Je viens de le voir Will the link to my English sentence be flagged with a warning? Will I be notified that the source sentence has changed so that I can change mine to I've just seen him? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Baudelaire Triglot Newbie France tatoeba.org Joined 6111 days ago 30 posts - 32 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishB2, Mandarin Studies: Latin, Shanghainese | Message 16 of 16 19 April 2011 at 10:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Actually you can tell in comment for which language your translation is also good, there's enough tatoeba-addict around to view your comment and link accordindgly
in the same time, to become a trusted user, well just send a private message to Trang and she will explain you everything For mistakes, there's no automatic warning (it's both for a lack of time from me and Trang, and also a lack of server power to support all this kind of additional but not vital features), but most of users prevent translators if they change one of sentence and if this sentence had translations. But the rules is to not change a sentence if it changes the meaning, and if there's no other way, then we simply unlink it, rather than to have to "correct" dozen of linked sentences (as anyway their were correct taken separatly) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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