Monday, February 28, 2011

Results for the banners mini contest

We organized a little contest for Tatoeba day #3. For those who haven't been following that...
  • The rules were mentioned here and here.
  • There submissions were published here.
Now the results!
  • 4 people participated
  • 16 people voted



First place: Muiriel (8 votes)

banner4-bigbanner5-small



Second place: CK (4 votes)

banner2-bigbanner2-small



Third place: Guybrush88 and U2FS (2 votes each)

banner1-bigbanner1-small

banner3-bigbanner3-small



Once more I would like to say thank you to our four brave participants. Thank you as well to everyone who voted! And of course, congratulations to Muiriel! :D

Muiriel told me that her submission was mostly the text, not the graphical aspect, so if anyone with better design skills is willing to revamp her banners into something better looking, they should not hesitate to do it :) Also, if you know how to translate that sentence into another language, then do it here!

And I will take this occasion to talk a little bit about our next artistic/design contest: I think it's time we start making Tatoeba T-shirts :) More info on that in a few weeks!

Saturday, February 26, 2011

Stats for Tatoeba day #3

Tatoeba day #3 was about linking.

Just a short explanation for those who don't know: linking is about establishing a connection between two sentences, to say "this sentence is a translation of that sentence".
Whenever a user translates a sentence, the link is created automatically between the sentence and the translation. But there are other sentences that are not connected, even though they are translations of each other, because they have been added separately. This is where we need to link.


Links per user

Our winner is by far Shishir with 218 links! Followed by brauliobezerra with 117 links, and CK with 108 links.

I only counted the links that were made manually, not those who were automatically added when translating.



NOTE 1: in reality, the number of links is twice as much as mentioned here because when a sentence A and B are linked, 2 links are created: A->B and B->A.

NOTE 2: Linking was and is currently still limited to "trusted users" so not everyone could participate to this Tatoeba day. The feature is not very user friendly which is why it is restricted only to users who have a good knowledge of Tatoeba.


Links per language

The stats below include ALL the links, even those created automatically when translating. English is (not surprisingly) the language that was the most translated from or into. Then we have French, German, Spanish and Esperanto, who were pretty much equally important.

Top 20



All the languages
  1. English: 1320 links
  2. French: 537 links
  3. German: 532 links
  4. Spanish: 525 links
  5. Esperanto: 507 links
  6. Bulgarian: 333 links
  7. Japanese: 297 links
  8. Portuguese: 268 links
  9. Italian: 237 links
  10. Mandarin Chinese: 214 links
  11. Lojban: 206 links
  12. Klingon: 153 links
  13. Dutch: 120 links
  14. Danish: 82 links
  15. Islandic: 58 links
  16. Hebrew: 26 links
  17. Russian: 22 links
  18. Volapük: 16 links
  19. Cantonese: 14 links
  20. Hungarian: 13 links
  21. Turkish: 13 links
  22. Shanghainese: 12 links
  23. Low German: 11 links
  24. Tagalog: 10 links
  25. Malayalam: 9 links
  26. Ukrainian: 7 links
  27. Polish: 6 links
  28. Uighur: 5 links
  29. Latin: 4 links
  30. Arabic: 4 links
  31. Frisian: 3 links
  32. Literary Chinese: 3 links
  33. Catalan: 3 links
  34. Afrikaans: 3 links
  35. Swedish: 2 links
  36. Belarusian: 1 link
  37. Vietnamese: 1 link
  38. Persian: 1 link

Next Tatoeba day

Our next Tatoeba day is currently scheduled for Saturday, March 26th. As usual I'll be posting more specific information a week before it starts :)

Monday, February 21, 2011

Banners mini contest

To read first, if you don't know about this mini contest:

I'm posting the banners in the order I received them :) Thank you to the 4 brave people who submitted them!


The banners

Banners 1

banner1-big
banner1-small




Banners 3

banner3-big
banner3-small





Time to vote!
  • Send a private message to Trang (and only a private message) with the title "[vote] Banners XXX" where XXX indicates your favorite set of banners. For instance "[vote] Banners 1" if you vote for the 1st set.
  • No need to write anything particular in the body. You should know however that you cannot send an empty message. If you don't know what to write, you can just copy-paste a random sentence from Tatoeba.
  • Only one vote per person.
  • The set of banners who has the most vote wins.
  • The votes will end on Monday 28th, at 21:00 France time. I will announce the winning banners shortly after that.

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Tatoeba update (Feb 19th, 2011)

Second update of the year :)

What's new
  • When browsing the profile, the sentences, the comments, the favorites or the Wall messages of a user, you will see a menu that will make it easier to jump between each of these pages.
  • We've added a page that lists all the sentences of a user, but with the sentences options (translate, adopt, favorite, etc). This is primarily to make it a bit easier to translate sentences of a specific user so you will find this page by browsing the sentences of a user and click on "Translate these sentences".
  • We've added pagination for private messages.
  • Last but not least, we've stabilized the language of the interface. If your interface is in Chinese, and you click on a link where the language is set to Esperanto, you shouldn't see your interface change to Esperanto anymore.

What next
  • Improvement of the profile (bigger textarea to edit your description).
  • Link/unlink feature (to be added in the "Contribution" sub-menu).

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Tatoeba day #3 (Feb 20th, 2011)

As mentioned previously, next Tatoeba day is scheduled for February 20th, which is on Sunday this week. So let's get ready!


The theme

First Tatoeba day was about adding sentences and translations (the main activity in Tatoeba). Second Tatoeba day was about adopting and correcting sentences, also an important but less "obvious" activity in Tatoeba. The theme for this 3rd edition will be linking, an even less obvious, but yet fundamental activity in Tatoeba. This is however more targeted to "advanced users" than new users.

As you may not know, linking is a feature that is restricted to trusted users. That's because it requires to understand that Tatoeba is structured as a graph, and it's not very intuitive. The feature will still remain restricted to trusted users, but if you wish to participate, don't hesitate to ask for the trusted user status by sending me a private message!

Some time next week, I will publish the number of sentences linked for each user and for each language.


Banners

For our 2nd Tatoeba on January we wanted to organize a little contest which was basically about creating banners for Tatoeba. We only had 3 submissions, so the deadline has been delayed to this Tatoeba day. I'm re-posting the rules, with a few changes:
  1. Make 2 images with the following sizes: 88x31 and 392x72. You may re-use our current logo in it, but don't hesitate to make another (better) logo if you are inspired.
  2. Send your 2 images to trang@tatoeba.org with the title "Tatoeba banners" and indicate in the email your Tatoeba username. I will reply you back to confirm that I have received them.
  3. The deadline is February 20th, 23:59 (France time).
  4. Shortly after the deadline I will publish the banners that were sent to me, no matter the number of submissions. Then Tatoeba users will have one week to vote for their favorite banner. I will indicate how to vote at the same time I publish the banners. IMPORTANT: I don't want people to be influenced by "who made the banner" during the vote so I will not indicate this information when I first publish the banners. I will ask you as well to keep your work "secret" the whole time (don't show it to anyone and don't say "I did this one").
  5. Once the votes are over, I will reveal the participants and announce the winner who will then be venerated forever by everyone for his/her talent :)