Tatoeba update (Mar 20th, 2010)

As mentioned in the previous update post, we are currently in a phase where we're taking care of the old and small tasks. Here's what we took care of this week.

Traditional Chinese

Chinese sentences are now displayed both in traditional AND simplified. Some contributors in Tatoeba contributed in simplified Chinese and others in traditional Chinese. Instead of asking people to contribute in both or only one form of writing, we let them do both, and we do the conversion automatically. The converted form is in grey, just like the pinyin.


Two new tools (for Chinese)

Since we have integrated traditional Chinese, we also added two new tools.

• Pinyin converter. We had a romaji/furigana converter for Japanese. Now you can do that for Chinese as well.
• Conversion between simplified/traditional Chinese.

Note that these tools are based on a software called Adso. You might as well go there if you need to convert.


Pagination on Wall

The Wall was getting quite crowded so we decided to start doing something about it. There is now a paginated version of the wall, in case you don't want to be displaying the entire wall. We still need to do a bit of restructuring though. In two weeks we will have a better wall :)


Latest messages from Wall on homepage

Since the Wall is being more and more used and visited, we eventually decided to display the latest messages on the homepage. Note that for now, clicking on the link of a message will still lead you to the non-paginated version of the Wall.


Number of sentences in lists

We also decided to improve a little bit the lists, by changing the way it is presented, and by displaying the number of sentences in the list.


What next?

On February 13th we went to an event organized by an association based in Paris called Shtooka. Their goal is to compile audio of words, expressions, proverbs, and guess what... sentences! Just like Tatoeba, what they produce is FREE (and with really good quality). They redistribute their content under a Creative Commons license as well (most of their collections are under CC-BY, the rest is CC-BY-SA).
Needless to say, projects were made for each other. They need written content to create audio from, and we have it. We (the users, my team, me) have always wanted audio in Tatoeba, and they provide this.
So you can expect a beginning (and I insist, it will just be a beginning) of audio integration in a couple of weeks :)

The other thing we are going to work on is to give the possibility for users to link and unlink sentences. This is a feature that is really really lacking, but this is also a feature that is very very difficult to implement. I cannot guarantee it will be ready for April 3rd, but we will do our best so that it is.