Tatoeba Project Blog: 2020

Tuesday, September 8, 2020

A summary of Kodoeba, our first coding event

This year we decided to organize a coding event which we named Kodoeba. The main goal: grow our community of developers.

It was a 10-week long event which was welcoming pretty much anyone who either wished to contribute to the internal code of Tatoeba, or to develop an external project that makes use of the Tatoeba corpus. We didn't have a very definite scope since this was our first coding event and we wanted to include as many people as possible.

We were 5 developers coordinating this event:

We had 27 participants at the start and 16 of them were deemed to have successfully completed the event.

alexs who worked on tag categorization (#2435).
diegohn who built a flashcard app (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad0tP00z_VQ).
fishda who improved the message displayed on vocabulary requests whent here's no request (#2273) and updated the shadow effect on language icons (#2334).
ftumsh who added information about original sentences to our export files (#2325) and fixed a field in our database so that Unicode characters would show up properly in list names (#2120).
jacopofar who built a cloze deletion tool focused on grammar (https://grammarquiz.online/).
jonnyk who built a Web app to create flashcards in bulk (https://sentence-finder-frontend.herokuapp.com/).
jpear1 who removed a no longer needed field from our database storing IP of contributors (#205) and implemented feature to save a search template (#2457).
Jpec who has been developing an a mobile app for learning Japanese with a section to create close deletion exercises from Tatoeba sentences (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jpec.benkyou_app).
lbdx who improved his tool listing unrepresented words in Tatoeba (Tatominer) and made all our export files split by language (#2360).
nummer_001 who fixed a UI string in the sentence component (#2324), changed the default order of sentences in tags (#2367), added a delete button to remove lists from the sentence page and implemented a new visibility option for lists (#2379).
polkadotazn who added the timezone in our tooltips with dates (#2471).
quielin who prototyped a basic mobile app for Tatoeba (Mobile Tatoeba Viewer).
Ricardo14 who updated a UI string in the settings (#2353) and fixed the localization of a string in the private messages (#2199)
Roverandom789133 who added a button to easily clear inputs in the advanced search form (#1728) and implemented a new design for the sort options (#2161).
sideral who created a script to replace Tom and Mary by other names (https://github.com/sideral/tatoeba-tom-mary).
xiuyuan who created a Web app for searching Chinese sentences (https://www.chineseboost.com/chinese-example-sentences).

We don't know yet when will be the next Kodoeba, but we definitely want to organize it again. We are happy we could help the participants learn something new and it was a good experience for us as well! We could see the various issues new developers run into when trying to get their hands on Tatoeba's code. We could also see how providing an API will become a more and more pressing matter as more and more developers integrate our sentences into their projects.

So until next time, we shall work on improving the onboarding of new developers and start slowly rallying developers who have been long waiting for an API. Then when the time comes, we will organize our second Kodoeba, where we will (perhaps) finally develop an official API for Tatoeba...? At least that's an idea :)

Thursday, August 27, 2020

Our journey towards a mobile-friendly UI

Our first attempt to provide a better experience for mobile users started in 2016. That was a pretty late attempt, considering that smartphones were already very widespread by then, but better late than never.

We were faced with basically two options:

Developing a mobile app.
Making the website responsive.

Developing a mobile app would have probably been the better option, but it was not an option we could afford. It would have meant dividing our efforts. The time we spend on re-implementing Tatoeba as a mobile app is time that we don't spend on maintaining and improving the existing website. So we went for the second option: migrating the existing UI towards a responsive UI and improving its design along the way.

This attempt was put on hold by the end of 2016, as we shifted towards other priorities. From this attempt, Tatoeba had some look and feel update, but was still not responsive.

Last year, however, thanks to Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) who granted us an award of $15,000, we were able to resume the initiative.

We first updated what was left to do with the look and feel, to make as many pages as possible visually consistent.

Then next (the hardest part), we re-implemented all the features from our "old" sentence component into our "new" sentence component, with some improvement and an updated design. Even though all the features were re-implemented, we could not completely switch away from the old sentence component yet. Throughout the whole process, our registered members have had the option to use either the old or new design. A majority have started to use the new design but there are still some issues in the new design we need to address before we can comfortably transition.

Lastly, in the past couple of months, we worked on making the landing page and the search results responsive. These two pages represent the largest portion of the traffic on Tatoeba so we figured it would be most beneficial for our mobile users to have these pages mobile-friendly first. The responsive landing page was deployed in July and the responsive search results in mid-August.

So finally! It took four years but we now have a responsive UI 🎉

...Or at least partially.

We will, of course, continue our efforts to redesign the rest of the pages, and also improve the speed. This might take another four years, who knows, but we will get there, eventually! You can, in any case, check our progress on GitHub. And if this is a topic which you wish to see progress faster, please consider contributing as a developer :)

We would like to thank MOSS again for their financial support, as well as everyone who helped with the development, with the testing. or who simply took the time to give us valuable feedback.

Wednesday, August 19, 2020

What's New on Tatoeba? - Your biweekly recap #23

What's New on Tatoeba will be published biweekly until the end of August.

KODOEBA EVENT

Kodoeba ended last week, on Monday, August 10th.
There will be a blog post to summarize what was achieved during the event.

UPDATES

The menu dropdowns are no longer hidden behind the private message sidebar. Thanks to Ricardo14 for reporting the issue and Trang for fixing it.
Various regressions have been fixed. Thanks to CK, Ricardo14 and jpear1 for reporting them and to rumpelstilzchen for fixing them.
The search results page is now responsive and nicer to view on mobile. Thanks to Trang for implementing this and to CK, gillux and rumpelstilzchen for their helpful feedback.
The tooltips that display dates are now more accurate as they indicate the timezone (UTC). Thanks to AlanF_US for reporting the issue and to polkadotazn (one of our Kodoeba participants) for working on it.

ON THE WALL

MisterTrouser reminded us about a feature request that would allow specifying the number of words when searching for sentences: https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35723
CK announced that we have a new German voice: https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35770
Ricardo wondered if we should force people to add a comment whenever they tag sentences: https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35784
mccarras asked if it's useful to fulfill vocabulary request by adding sentences that slightly differ from the request: https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35804
earthsophagus asked several questions that other new members might also ask themselves: https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35745
Impersonator suggested changing the Belarusian language icon: https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35794
deniko asked if we should get rid of the flags altogether: https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35800

LANGUAGES

Tatoeba is supporting a new language: Plains Cree.
We have been discussing how to give more recognition to people who translate the website UI: https://github.com/Tatoeba/tatoeba2/issues/2481

As usual, we thank everyone who helped to translate the website, but perhaps in the future, we integrate something in Tatoeba to better acknowledge this work!

If you'd like to help to the development of Tatoeba, report issues, or are just curious, have a look at the GitHub repository.

If you want to help us translate the website to your language, you can join us on Transifex: https://www.transifex.com/tatoe...ite/dashboard/ and check this article on the wiki https://en.wiki.tatoeba.org/art...e-translation.

If you're especially happy with one of the updates, don't hesitate to personally thank our developers :) They're working in the shadow but they'll be glad to hear your feedback.

Original post on the Wall

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

What's New on Tatoeba? - Your biweekly recap #22

What's New on Tatoeba will be published biweekly until the end of August.

KODOEBA EVENT

We are in the last week of Kodoeba and we have five new issues solved on internal code since last time.

It is now possible to remove a sentence from a list from the sentence page. Thanks to Ricardo14 for reporting the issue and nummer_001 for implementing it.
There is a new visibility option for lists, in case you want your list to be shown on the sentence page to every user (and not just to yourself). Thanks to soliloquist for raising the issue and nummer_001 for working on it.
Unicode characters are now showing up properly in list names. Thanks to soliloquist for reporting the issue and ftumsh for fixing it.
You can now save create URL for templates from the advanced search. Thanks to Ricardo14 for triggering the idea and jpear1 for implementing it.
The sort options have been redesigned. Thanks to Trang for the design suggestion, AlanF_US for the help with the wording and Roverandom789133 for the implementation.

There are three additional external projects which you can have a peek at:

quielin's TatoebaViewer mobile app (it's still a prototype): https://github.com/Tatoeba/TatoebaViewer
xiuyuan's website to search Chinese sentences (work still in progress): https://www.chineseboost.com/chinese-example-sentences
diegohn's flashcard webapp (not deployed anywhere, but there's a video explaining how to install it locally): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad0tP00z_VQ

UPDATES

Mobile users can now change the position of the cursor in text inputs. Thanks to rumpelstilzchen for reporting this bug and Trang for fixing it.
When searching sentences sorted randomly, the results are no longer re-randomized when going back to a previous page. Thanks to AlanF_US for reporting the issue and gillux for fixing it.

ON THE WALL

driini announced that the Quick Start Guide has been fully translated into German: https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35705
CK announced that we have a new Japanese voice: https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35698
OptiMaximus asked what "Tatoeba" means: https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35679
pergpau brought up the topic of quality in the corpus and subsequently became an advanced contributor to help improve the quality of Norwegian Bokmål sentences: https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35667

LANGUAGES

Tatoeba is supporting one new language: Karakhanid.
Slovak has been enabled on production as a UI language.

As usual, thanks to all the members who helped to translate the website!

If you'd like to help to the development of Tatoeba, report issues, or are just curious, have a look at the GitHub repository.

If you want to help us translate the website to your language, you can join us on Transifex: https://www.transifex.com/tatoeba/tatoeba_website/dashboard/ and check this article on the wiki https://en.wiki.tatoeba.org/articles/show/interface-translation.

If you're especially happy with one of the updates, don't hesitate to personally thank our developers :) They're working in the shadow but they'll be glad to hear your feedback.

Original post on the Wall

Monday, July 20, 2020

What's New on Tatoeba? - Your biweekly recap #21

What's New on Tatoeba will be published biweekly until the end of August.

KODOEBA EVENT

We have two new issues solved on internal code since last time.

Information about original sentences is now available in the "Base of Sentences" section of the Downloads page. Thanks to ftumsh.
All the export files are split by language. Thanks to lbdx for the scripts that splits our exports, and to gillux and rumpelstilzchen for helping to optimize the solution.

A few external projects are now ready to receive feedback. You are kindly invited to check them out and share your thoughts!

jacopofar's cloze deletion tool: https://grammarquiz.online/
jonnyk's tool to automatically generate vocabulary flashcards: https://sentence-finder-frontend.herokuapp.com/
Jpec's Japanese learning app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jpec.benkyou_app

UPDATES

The vocabulary count has been fixed. Thanks to AlanF_US for reporting the issue and rumpelstilzchen for fixing it.
Searching sentences with a question mark at the end no longer returns an error page. Thanks to CK for reporting this and gillux for fixing it.
rumpelstilzchen solved a bug where the search was returning sentences in the wrong language. Thanks to him for the fix and to brauchinet for reporting it.
The landing page is now responsive. Thanks to Trang for implementing this and to everyone for testing.
Logs on our servers are now a bit less cluttered. Thanks to rumpelstilzchen for taking care of this, and to gillux for suggesting it.

ON THE WALL

miketheknight asked if we could extend the functionality of the search option "Owned by a self-identified native": https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35625
CK announced that we have a new Polish voice: https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35655
Trang needs people to test the responsive search results: https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35638
morbrorper asked how we can more easily flag and track translations that don't match: https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35618

LANGUAGES

Tatoeba is supporting eight new languages: Chinook Jargon, Southern Subanen, Ancient Hebrew, Pali, Baluchi, South Levantine Arabic, Southern Haida and Northern Haida.
Serbian has been enabled on production as a UI language.
Several other UI languages have been enabled on dev: Bulgarian, Filipino, Turkmen, Croatian, Slovak and Balushi.

As usual, thanks to all the members who helped to translate the website!

If you'd like to help to the development of Tatoeba, report issues, or are just curious, have a look at the GitHub repository.

If you want to help us translate the website to your language, you can join us on Transifex: https://www.transifex.com/tatoeba/tatoeba_website/dashboard/ and check this article on the wiki https://en.wiki.tatoeba.org/articles/show/interface-translation.

If you're especially happy with one of the updates, don't hesitate to personally thank our developers :) They're working in the shadow but they'll be glad to hear your feedback.

Original post on the Wall

Tuesday, June 30, 2020

What's New on Tatoeba? - Your biweekly recap #20

What's New on Tatoeba will be published biweekly until the end of August.

EVENT

It's been now one month since our Kodoeba event started.

As far as the internal code goes:

Our participants have solved five issues, and seven others are on their way. You can find the details on GitHub.
Alexs has asked for feedback about the tags: https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35555. Be sure to share your thoughts if you'd like to see the tags in Tatoeba become more useful!

As for the external projects:

lbdx has updated Tatominer: https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35527.

The other projects are starting to take shape, it's still too early to showcase anything. We'll have to wait until mid or end of July.

UPDATES

The search has been improved for languages using Arabic scripts, Indonesian and Tagalog. Many thanks to Yorwba.
The number of messages in the private messages has been localized, thanks to Ricardo14.
There's now a reset icon in the inputs of the advanced search. Thanks to Roverandom789133 for adding this.
We no longer unnecessarily store IPs in our contributions logs. Thanks to jpear1 for cleaning this up.

ON THE WALL

Trang has been working on making the landing page responsive: https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35464
gillux has asked which sentences would be a good candidate to print on a Tatoeba T-shirt or mug: https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35547
tommg has announced the release of his language learning app that uses Tatoeba's data: https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35512

LANGUAGES

Rircardo14 posted some updatea about the progress of the translation of our UI: https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35518.
A new UI language has been enabled on the dev website: Serbian.
As usual, thanks to all the members who helped to translate the website!

If you'd like to help to the development of Tatoeba, report issues, or are just curious, have a look at the GitHub repository.

If you want to help us translate the website to your language, you can join us on Transifex: https://www.transifex.com/tatoeba/tatoeba_website/dashboard/ and check this article on the wiki https://en.wiki.tatoeba.org/articles/show/interface-translation.

If you're especially happy with one of the updates, don't hesitate to personally thank our developers :) They're working in the shadow but they'll be glad to hear your feedback.

Original post on the Wall

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

What's New on Tatoeba? - Your biweekly recap #19

What's New on Tatoeba will be published biweekly until the end of August

EVENT

Kodoeba, Tatoeba's first coding event, has started at the beginning of June! 27 participants joined us to improve Tatoeba in one or another way. A big thank you and a warm welcome to all of them! We will regularly hear of their work in this column.

UPDATES

The way to add tag has been modified to include the number of tagged sentences and make the suggestions case-insensitive. This was one of many issues related to tags that we want to take care of in the more or less near future. Thanks to alexs, rumpelstilzchen, and all the people who helped solving this.
Using a single quote in the search input used to make the search string disappeared. Thanks to gillux for correcting this bug.
The pages showing sentences using a specific tag now display the most-recently tagged sentences first. Thanks to bakananbanjin (a participant of Kodoeba) for taking care of this.

ON THE WALL

CK started a discussion about the use of the question mark in searches https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/3543
sharptoothed gave charts about the most translated sentences on Tatoeba https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35483
orion17 started a discussion about adding sentences using spoken language and how to handle them https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35452

CONTRIBUTIONS AND LANGUAGES

36 611 sentences added the last two weeks.
Tatoeba now supports 367 languages: Nuosu has been added on ljradio's request, and Drents has been added on MarijnKp's request
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuosu_language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr%C3%A8ents_dialects
As usual, thanks to all the members who helped translating the website.

If you'd like to help to the development of Tatoeba, report issues, or are just curious, have a look at the GitHub repository

If you want to help us translate the website to your language, you can join us on Transifex: https://www.transifex.com/tatoeba/tatoeba_website/dashboard/ and check this article on the wiki https://en.wiki.tatoeba.org/articles/show/interface-translation

If you're especially happy with one of the updates, don't hesitate to personally thank our developers :) They're working in the shadow but they'll be glad to hear your feedback.

Fun fact: Emojicode is a programming language using emojis as its syntax.

Original wall post on Tatoeba

Wednesday, June 3, 2020

Tatoeba scheduled maintenance on Sunday June 7, 2am to 5am UTC

This Sunday (June 7) at 2am UTC, there will be scheduled maintenance for a maximum of 3 hours. Tatoeba will be unavailable during this time. We will be using this time to upgrade our systems, which will allow us to implement new features in the future. For what it’s worth, Tatodev will remain online.

Sunday, May 31, 2020

Kodoeba #1 - Participants

Kodoeba is about to start and we are happy to present you our 27 participants!

We have 13 participants who will be working on an external project, that is a project which will be using Tatoeba's data.

We have 14 participants who working on internal code, which means they will be contributing the source code of the tatoeba.org website.

External projects

arademaker and Cristiananc - Exploring Tatoeba for wordnet expansion and evaluation.
diegohn - Flashcard app with Tatoeba sentences.
hugokawamata - Native mobile app that teaches Japanese holistically by providing context at every stage of learning and by teaching multiple aspects of the language at once.
jacopofar - Online cloze deletion tool focused on grammar.
jjmountain - Translation game for Japanese students learning English.
jonnyk - Web app to create flashcards in bulk using Tatoeba sentences.
Jpec - Implementation of exercise with dialogs in mobile app for learning Japanese.
lbdx - Improve tool listing unrepresented words in Tatoeba and develop Python library to easily download and process the Tatoeba corpus.
quielin and adaycito - Mobile Tatoeba Viewer.
sideral - Multilingual semantic sentence search.
xiuyuan - Web app for searching Chinese sentences via hanzi, pinyin or English.

We will try to update you weekly on the progress of the various projects.

Internal code

You can follow the the internal code activity by checking our pull requests as each participant will be solving issues by submitting pull requests.

We wish everyone happy coding!

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

What's New on Tatoeba? - Your weekly recap #18

UPDATES

gillux reworked and improved the code related to the search feature. You want see any difference but it will allow developers to more easily improve the search feature, something I'm sure a lot of people can't wait to see happening. That's a huge work so let's give a warm round of applause to gillux.
The space to type a sentence is now multiline on all designs, making it easier to contribute long sentences. Thanks to Ricardo14 for adding this.
A settings allowing users that can choose the license of their contributions to choose the default license has been added. If you'd like to contribute under CC0, you can refer to this article https://en.wiki.tatoeba.org/articles/show/cc0-contributions

ON THE WALL

sharptoothed and CK created some charts about the most used languages on Tatoeba https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35208
Ricardo14 gave and impressive list of resources to learn languages https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35244
CK updated his list of native speakers with contributions https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35315

CONTRIBUTIONS AND LANGUAGES

18 424 sentences have been added this week.
On Kimogol's request, Rendille has been added to Tatoeba, bringing the number of supported languages to 365 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendille_language
As usual, thanks to all the members who helped translating the website.

Fun fact: Lake Malawi, located between Malawi, Tanzania and Mozambique, has more fish species than any other freshwater system on earth.

Original wall post on Tatoeba

Monday, May 18, 2020

What's New on Tatoeba? - Your weekly recap #17

UPDATES

Thanks to Trang, and everyone's feedback, the review feature is now available on the new sentence design. Cheers to her!
The wiki now have a Turkish version. At this time, it only has one article, the quick start guide. Feel free to expand it if you can write Turkish!
rumpelstilzchen did some minor optimizations to make hopefully Tatoeba run a little bit faster. Let us know if you feel the difference!
The language "Chinese (Jin)" has been renamed to "Jin Chinese" for consistency with other Chinese languages. (It was already translated like that in some languages.) Thanks to Yorwba for reporting the issue.
The shadow behind non-rectangular flags now correctly follows the shape of the flag instead. This improvement makes flags like Marathi look much better. Thanks to sabretou for the suggestion and speedysera (a new contributor on Github) for the implementation.
Yorwba significantly improved the tool that converts between traditional and simplified characters and Pinyin.

ON THE WALL

Trang asked to test the review feature in the new sentence design.
mramosch asked for stats on German corpus about which languages sentences are translated from, if an.
sacredceltic shared an interesting video about the difficulty of translating the word "you".
radubradu asked how to find words to translate in Romanian.
CK created a tutorial video about searching on Tatoeba.

CONTRIBUTIONS AND LANGUAGES

19 369 sentences have been added this week.
On shekitten's request, Phoenician and Jewish Palestinian Aramaic have been added to Tatoeba, bringing the number of supported languages to 364!
As usual, thanks to all the members who helped translating the website.

Fun fact: there are many more children throughout the world who have been and continue to be educated through a second or a later-acquired language than there are children educated exclusively via the first language.

Original post on the Wall

Sunday, May 10, 2020

What's New on Tatoeba? - Your weekly recap #16

UPDATES

This week, several issues have been discussed and regular updates will come again next week.

ON THE WALL

TRANG asked some help to test the review feature in new sentence design https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35102
TRANG asked some feedback about the Previous/Random/Next buttons on the sentence page https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35130
The Terms of Use have been translated to Kabyle. Thanks to our Kabyle translators. The terms of use are now available in five languages.
aucampia started a discussion about CC0 sentences https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35118

CONTRIBUTIONS AND LANGUAGES

16 923 sentences have been added this week.
On bhupendergiri's request, Newari has been added to Tatoeba, bringing the number of supported languages to 362 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newar_language
As usual, thanks to all the members who helped translating the website.

Fun fact: South Africa has 11 official languages.

Original wall post on Tatoeba

Tuesday, May 5, 2020

What's New on Tatoeba? - Your weekly recap #15

UPDATES

This week, gillux and rumpelstilzchen have been working in the back to improve security on the website. Thanks to them for the hard work.

ON THE WALL

jmdesp asked why some search results don't appear if they are orphans https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/34854
gillux asked how we can process some huge content of French sentences https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35073
sharptoothed gave a graph of contributions for the top 30 languages over the last two weeks https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35075

CONTRIBUTIONS AND LANGUAGES

16 613 sentences have been added this week.
The flags of the following languages have been modified: Gulf Arabic (afb), Arabic (ara), Cayuga (cay), Lower Sorbian (dsb), Dutton World Speedwords (dws), Scots (sco), Scottish Gaelic (gla), Kamba (kam), Naga (Tangshang) (nst), Old Spanish (osp), , Sanskrit (san), Tahaggart Tamahaq (thv), Old Turkic (otk).
And as usual, thanks to all the members who helped translating the website.

Fun fact: Most of the world’s languages are spoken in Asia and Africa.

Original wall post on Tatoeba

Sunday, May 3, 2020

Announcing Kodoeba #1

What is Kodoeba?

Kodoeba is a coding event where people contribute to the development of Tatoeba or the development of a project using Tatoeba’s data. The event takes place online and will last a couple of months.

At the end of the event, everyone will receive a small reward for their participation. This year, participants will get to choose between a Tatoeba T-shirt or a Tatoeba mug.

You don’t have to be an experienced programmer. Beginners are welcome too!

Why this event?

We would like to raise awareness about the fact that Tatoeba is an open source and non-profit project. To ensure that Tatoeba continues to grow and prosper, we need more developers to join us.

While anyone can start getting involved at any time, we know that the first steps can be difficult. We hope that this event can provide a less intimidating and more engaging onboarding experience for new developers to dive into the dev side of Tatoeba.

Timeline

May 4th - Applications open.
May 24th - Applications end.
May 31st - Announcement of accepted participants.
June 1st - Event starts.
August 10th - Event ends.

Application

To apply, please fill up the Kodoeba application form.

We expect around 20 participants but we could accept up to 30 participants if the interest in this event goes beyond our expectations.

Type of participation

There are three ways in which you can participate:

External project - You would like to work on a project that uses Tatoeba's data. In this case, we will not be involved in the development of your project but we will ensure you can access the data you need and that this data is easy to use for your project.
Internal project - You would like to work on implementing something in Tatoeba's codebase. This is not limited to the tatoeba2 repository. It could be a project in one of the other repositories (imouto or tatowiki for instance).
No project - You don’t have a project in mind and would prefer that we define tasks for you to complete.

Schedule

The event itself will last 10 weeks but this doesn’t mean everyone must be coding for 10 weeks.

We expect participants to spend on average 40 hours coding. You can spend this time all in a single week, or you can spread this time through 10 weeks. It’s up to you to manage your time based on your personal schedule.

In the end, whether you spend 20 or 80 hours coding, the point is that you are doing something that is meaningful to you and can feel proud of.

Questions?

Feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

Tuesday, April 28, 2020

What's New on Tatoeba? - Your weekly recap #14

UPDATES

The (un)linking feature has been added to the new design. Thanks to TRANG for the implementation and to everyone who gave their feedback.
The "Activity timeline" has been moved from the "Contribute" menu to the stats block. Thanks to gillux for the modification and to all the people who discussed the reorganization of the stats block.
The language level bars displayed on the "Languages of members" page have been fixed. Thanks to sabretou for reporting the issue and to rumpelstilzchen for fixing it.

ON THE WALL

sharptoothed shared some stats graphs https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/34985 https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/34999
jegaevi volunteered for recording Hungarian sentences and opened a public list for people to add sentences to record https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35001
Eremon discussed about orphan sentences and Tatoeba ways of contributing in general https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/34987
pastelite wondered what we should do when one sentence can have several translations https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/35002
mramosch discussed about audio and a personal initiative to increase the number of audio recordings https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/show_message/35013

CONTRIBUTIONS AND LANGUAGES

19 400 sentences have been added this week.
On pastelite's request, Isan has been added to the list of supported languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isan_language
On fj_nambala's request, Tonga (Zambezi) has been added to the list of supported languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonga_language_(Zambia_and_Zimbabwe)
Thanks to MarijnKP's efforts, Gronings is now available as a U.I. language.
And as usual, thanks to all the members who helped translating the website.

Fun fact: With around 10 to 12 million native speakers, Haitian Creole is the most-widely spoken creole language in terms of native speakers, and is recognized as an official language of Haiti.

Original wall post on Tatoeba

Monday, April 20, 2020

What's New on Tatoeba? - Your weekly recap #13

UPDATES

gillux has been working on helping translators better translate the website interface. Notes giving context have been added, and ambiguous strings split in order to more easily identify where and how string are used on the website. Thanks to him for this huge work.
A bug preventing the removal of a sentence from the favorites list has been corrected. Thanks to deniko for reporting and gillux for fixing it.
Thanks to rumpelstilzchen for addressing an issue with overly long tag names, preventing warning messages to be displayed when they shouldn't.
gillux did a lot of code cleaning this week. It will be invisible to most of us, but it's always good for developers, new and old, to work in a clean environment. Thanks to him for all that.

ON THE WALL

sabretou proposed an update of the flags for Gulf Arabic, Arabic, Dutton World Speedwords, Old Spanish, and Sanskrit https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/show_message/34867
deniko provided some interesting data about sentence "clouds" https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/show_message/34822

CONTRIBUTIONS AND LANGUAGES

18 808 sentences have been added this week.
On shekitten's request, Nyungar has been added, bringing the number of supported languages to 359 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyungar_language
Kurdish (Kurdî) is now available as interface language.
And as usual, thanks to all the members who helped translating the website.

Fun fact: "Pteronophobia" is the fear of feathers. Some people are afraid of heights, some of being tickled by feathers. That's a tough world.

Original wall post on Tatoeba

Monday, April 13, 2020

What's New on Tatoeba? - Your weekly recap #12

UPDATES

It is now possible to download transcriptions. Similarly to other downloads, you can choose to export only the language you're interested in, among those available (Cantonese, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Uzbek). Thanks to gillux for implementing this feature asked by Lemmi (on GitHub).
Lists can now be downloaded into three different formats: raw text (.txt), the default, Tab-separated (.tsv), and as a file that can directly be used with the Shtooka recorder. This should give more liberty to all users that use lists for offline work :) Thanks to gillux for implementing the feature.
The "Contribute Menu" now has a "Add vocabulary request" submenu. Thanks to danail-georgiev (on GitHub) for adding it, on AlanF_US's suggestion.
The "Delete" and "Download" actions of a list page have been moved to the header, where the name of the list is written (only in the new design). Thanks to gillux for the modification.
rumpelstilzchen added some admin feature to deal with licensing issues. Thanks to him for the work.

ON THE WALL

shekitten proposed a change to the Yiddish flag https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/show_message/34753
Aiji asked corpus maintainers for their feedback about their proofreading habit. If you're a corpus maintainer, please let an answer there :) https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/show_message/34783
Ibdx provided a list of words that don't appear much in Tatoeba's sentences although they are often searched by others https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/show_message/34793
sharptoothed shared his usual Stats, Graphs & Charts https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/show_message/34808

CONTRIBUTIONS AND LANGUAGES

14 466 sentences have been added this week.
On shekitten's request, Syriac has been added https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syriac_language
On Taam's request, North Frisian has been added https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Frisian_language

This brings the number of supported languages to 358! Thanks to Ricardo14 and gillux for coordinating this.
And as usual, thanks to all the members who helped translating the website.

Fun fact: Trying to find interesting, not commonly known, fun facts is difficult.

Original wall post on Tatoeba

Monday, April 6, 2020

What's New on Tatoeba? - Your weekly recap #11

UPDATES

Transcriptions have been added to the new design. Thanks to TRANG for her work.
The "Contact user" button has been moved out the side menu of profile pages. Those pages will be reworked, but until then, that should help us to contact each other more easily. Thanks to Ricardo14 for the idea and gillux for the modification.
AndiPersti continued his work to properly sanitize characters in Tatoeba's contributions, solving some issues due to special characters (or more precisely, prevent these issues from happening). Thanks to him for his work.
A bug where a reply to a message on the wall wasn't nested to the correct level until we refreshed the page has been corrected. Thanks to AlanF_US for reporting and Aiji for solving the issue.
And as usual, thanks to all our developers who added some correction, optimization and all the little things that we don't see but have their importance :)

ON THE WALL

Thanuir asked for example sentences using the words "good-man" and "good-wife" and discussed how compound words are handled on Tatoeba https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/show_message/34707
Ibdx discussed about adding more sentences containing words whose meanings are often looked for and built a list of words that are often searched https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/show_message/34645

CONTRIBUTIONS AND LANGUAGES

16 048 sentences have been added this week.
On Julien_PDC's request, Old French has been added to Tatoeba, bringing the number of languages to 356! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_French
As usual, thanks to Ricardo14 and gillux for coordinating this.
And as usual, thanks to all the members who helped translating the website.

Fun fact: JoMo, Esperantist and polyglot, accomplished the first Guiness Record for a multilingual concert, where he sang 22 songs in 22 languages.

Original wall post on Tatoeba

Tuesday, March 31, 2020

What's New on Tatoeba? - Your weekly recap #10

UPDATES

A small week it was. Some discussions here, some updates of code there, everybody needs a rest sometimes. Stay tuned next week for nice new features!

ON THE WALL

hamsolo474 started a thread leading to discussing various topics, such as the quality of a sentence and good search results https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/show_message/34604
gillux performed a new UX test, this time on a user very familiar with Tatoeba. You can also help us by performing this kind of test and write a summary :) https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/show_message/34618
Ooneykcall started a thread that led to discuss copyright and licensing https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/show_message/3463
Ibdx discussed about adding more sentences containing words whose meanings are often looked for https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/show_message/34645

CONTRIBUTIONS AND LANGUAGES

15 689 sentences added this week. You can check daily activity on this page https://tatoeba.org/eng/contributions/activity_timeline
This week, two languages were added, bringing the number of languages on Tatoeba to 355! Thanks to Ricardo14 and gillux for coordinating this.
On zorgzikhnit's request, Bislama has been added https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bislama
On MarijnKp's request, Saterland Frisian has been added https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saterland_Frisian
Some of our members helped translating the website (crediting using Transifex usernames). In arbitrary order:
gorkaazk, elenacristina260, herrsilen, SAmiri, Les90, yanis.batura, Aiji, gillux, arh, MarijnKp, RyckRichards, fjay69, Gulo_Luscus, robin0van0der0vliet, shekitten, Mohsin_Ali, Yorwba, easononizuka, maxine22zhang, Silja, Thanuir, Guybrush88, 58karel, michel.smts2, robin0van0der0vliet, sabretou, small_snow

Fun fact: Mary Poppins’ “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” actually appears in some dictionaries.

Original wall post on Tatoeba

Monday, March 23, 2020

What's New on Tatoeba? - Your weekly recap #9

UPDATES

From the Downloads page, it is now possible to downlad only sentences in a specific language. Have a look at it, that's very cool! Thanks to AndiPersti for implementing this.
There was a bug causing the displayed number of sentences in a list to be different on the "Browse by list" page (wrong number) and the page of the list itself (good number). This has been fixed, and from now on both numbers should be equal. Thanks to CK for reporting and Aiji for fixing it.
gillux did some optimization work in order to lighten some things here and there. As often, that's almost invisible work for most of us, but it's a good thing that it's done!

ON THE WALL

deniko started a discussion on some aspects of the new design. https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/show_message/34472
because_maybe's post led to talk a little about stemming and lemmatization. https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/show_message/34483
TRANG asked some help to test the transcription feature in the new design. https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/show_message/34534
Hybrid talked about the way to change the language of a sentence in the new design.
https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/show_message/34560

CONTRIBUTIONS AND LANGUAGES

This week, we can have a look at sharptoothed's details stats :) https://tatoeba.j-langtools.com/allstats/

This week, two languages were added, bringing the number of languages on Tatoeba to 353! Thanks to Ricardo14 and gillux for coordinating this.
On AqQoyriq_1's request, Evenki has been added https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evenki_language

On Balamax's request, Okinawan has been added
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okinawan_language

Fun fact: German is the most widely spoken language in the European Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_language

Original wall post on Tatoeba

Monday, March 16, 2020

What’s New on Tatoeba? - Your weekly recap #8

UPDATES

The highlight of this update is about the new design. What we call the "new design" is an ongoing project that aims to make Tatoeba usable on mobile, generally more attractive and to solve a number of bugs inherent to the current design. We thought this new design is getting mature enough to be used by a broader audience, and we’d like to gather more real-life feedback from our community. That’s why this update introduces a message over the random sentence block to more proactively suggest trying it out.

Over the last months, Trang has been working very hard on porting features from the old design to the new design, including the "Add a translation" and "Add to list" sentence buttons, and individual lists pages. Thanks to her for the implementation, to gillux and rumpelstilzchen for code reviewing, to everyone who have been testing and sending us feedback, and to Mozilla for financing us. Constructive feedback about the new design is very welcome.

Other than that:

Every wall post now have a "Send message" button to easily send a private message to the poster. Thanks to Aiji for the suggestion and implementation.
The default sort order of the "View all tags" page has been fixed. Thanks to CK for reporting the problem and gillux for fixing it.
A bug that prevented guests from playing audio on indirect translations has been discovered and fixed by gillux.
rumpelstilzchen and gillux did some cleanup in the code base. This maintenance work is invisible to users, but it always feels nice for current and future developers to work in a clean place, doesn’t it?

ON THE WALL

CK started a discussion about translations in the same language as original, which turned into a debate about corpus diversity.
Thanuir posted a proposal about reviewing sentences in a way that would allow regular members to better contribute to the proofreading effort.

CONTRIBUTIONS AND LANGUAGES

12,207 sentences have been contributed last week. You can check daily activity.
A new language was added: Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. This brings the number of supported languages to 351! Thanks to shekitten for requesting the language and providing the flag, gillux for reviewing and Ricardo14 for coordinating.
Some of our members helped translating the website (crediting using Transifex usernames):

In Swedish: ajje
In Norwegian: vikvaering
In Kirundi: dorée
In French: Rockaround, RyckRichards, gillux and sacredceltic
In Spanish: arh
In Gronings: MarijnKp
In Portuguese: RyckRichards
In Russian: fjay69 and sharptoothed
In Turkish: Gulo_Luscus
In German: Pfirsichbäumchen
In Breton: Iriep
In Esperanto: PaulP
In Finnish: Silja and Thanuir
In Italian: Guybrush88
In Dutch: 58karel and michel.smts2
In Interligua: shekitten
In Hungarian: Wydy99
In Marathi: sabretou
In Japanese: small_snow

Thank you very much everybody! You too can help us translate the website to your language by joining us on Transifex (check our article on the wiki).

If you’d like to help to the development of Tatoeba, report issues, or are just curious, have a look at the GitHub repository.

If you’re especially happy with something, don’t hesitate to personally thank people who participated in this update. Most of us are working in the shadow but we are always glad to hear your feedback.

Fun fact: if we compress the history of the universe (from the big bang to now) into one year, the History as we know it spans for less than 30 seconds.

Original wall post on Tatoeba

Sunday, March 8, 2020

What's New on Tatoeba? - Your weekly recap #7

UPDATES

Moved the copy button out of "experimental options". It's now a full feature in its own.
Corrected searches using the "owned by a self-identified native speaker". Thanks to TRANG for reporting and AndiPersti (on GitHub) and gillux for solving the issue.
Corrected a bug where encoding of CSS files were wrongly interpreted. Thanks to Pandaa and Yorwba for reporting and AndiPersti for the fix.
Modified the informative message on the downloads page. It now displays the correct time at which files are available (6:30 a.m. UTC)

ON THE WALL

Scuba was wondering how we should translate Japanese sentences, where subjects or objects are so often implied, into languages like English. https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/show_message/34330
maaster asked for some explanation about the German "sage mal so" https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/show_message/34344
sacredceltic started a discussion about removing links. https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/show_message/34350

CONTRIBUTIONS

Added stemming to Greek, Tamil, Basque, Hindi, Arabic, Catalan, Nepali, Irish and Lithuanian. See gillux's explanation for more details https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/show_message/34326
On conlangbecca's request (on GitHub), Ladino sentences written in Hebrew are now displayed from right to left.

15 372 sentences added this week (from one export to another). You can check daily activity on this page https://tatoeba.org/eng/contributions/activity_timeline

Fun fact: False cognates are pairs of words that seem to be related, because of similar sounds and meaning, but have different etymologies. For example, the English "much" and Spanish "mucho" come from completely different Proto-Indo-European roots.

Original wall post on Tatoeba

Monday, March 2, 2020

What's New on Tatoeba? - Your weekly recap #6

UPDATES

The implementation of the new design continues, this time with the addition of the "Add to list" functionality. Thanks to TRANG for her work.
Improved the way to add languages on the profile page. The addition of a new language has been made more dynamic and it should now be easier to use and understand. Thanks to Ricardo14 for reporting the issue and gillux for the improvement.
The terms of use are now displayed in the selected interface language if their translation is available. This is part of a more global improvement on how we deal with Transifex. Thanks to gillux for his work.
Fixed an error occurring when checking "Owned by a self-identified native" for English sentences. Thanks to CK and others who reported the issue and gillux for fixing it.

ON THE WALL

CK gave some stats and links to search sentences https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/show_message/34292
sharptoothed gave use his usual Stats & Graphs :) https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/show_message/34300
Ricardo14 gave an updated feedback about the translations on Transifex, the tool we use to translate Tatoeba interface. https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/show_message/34306

CONTRIBUTIONS

14 804 sentences added this week (from one export to another). You can check daily activity on this page https://tatoeba.org/eng/contributions/activity_timeline

Fun fact: Rotokas, a language spoken in Papua New Guinea, has an alphabet consisting of only twelve letters, representing eleven phonemes, making it perhaps the smallest modern alphabet.

Original wall post on Tatoeba