Saturday, April 4, 2009

Collaboration with language teachers

My plan for this year 2009 is to find a few language teachers who would be interested in collaborating with Tatoeba Project in order to help increase the quantity and the quality of the English->French and Japanese->French translations.

Teachers have students, and they have authority on these students. Students either want to or have to learn the foreign language their teacher is teaching, and part of the learning process consist in doing translations. If this translation activity could take place on Tatoeba, it could greatly increase the data! I know that students will not contribute on their own initiative. It has to be either homework, or something to be done during class. That's why I need the collaboration of teachers.

For the record, there are currently over 150,000 sentences in English and Japanese, and about 24,000 French translations for these 150,000 sentences. Therefore, there are two ways to increase the number of French translations:
  1. Add an English or Japanese sentence, and translate it into French (which would have been the only way if all the English and Japanese sentence had a French translation).
  2. Translate an already existing English or Japanese sentence into French.
The good thing about the second way is that the contributors won't need to think of what sentences to add. However, it requires that they have a minimum of knowledge of the source language, and that the original sentences don't have any mistake, or it could confuse them.

This means that I will need the help of :
  • English<->French teachers : to bring French translations for the English sentences, and correct the English and French sentences that have mistakes.
  • Japenese<->French teachers : to bring French translations for the Japanese sentences, correct the Japanese and French sentences that have mistakes.
  • English<->Japanese teachers : to correct the Japanese and English sentences that have mistakes, and bring sentences that have new vocabulary.
I have described in another post how exactly things could work.