Saturday, October 17, 2015

Tatoeba update (October 17th, 2015)

** Tatoeba update (October 17th, 2015) **

* Sentences can now be added to a list from the list page.
* Language autodetection is no longer influenced by the number of sentences a user has added in a particular language.
* Including the string "@<username>" in a comment will now cause an e-mail notification to be sent to that user.

* The following languages have been added:
** Northern Sami
** Choctaw
** Kapampangan
** Coastal Kadazan
** Central Dusun
** North Moluccan Malay
** Tongan
** Samoan
** Fijian
** Wolof
** Chechen
** Fiji Hindi
** Ngeq
** Sango

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Tatoeba update (September 30th, 2015)

** Tatoeba update (September 30th, 2015)  **

* Sentences within a list chosen from "Browse by list" now show indirect as well as direct translations.
* When a private message is sent, the recipient is now notified by e-mail.
* The language Tigrinya has been added.

Friday, September 4, 2015

Tatoeba update (September 4th, 2015)

** Tatoeba update (September 4th, 2015) **

* Corpus maintainers can now change the language of a sentence into any language.
* Two page titles that always appeared in English have been replaced by translatable strings.
* The counter for sentences with audio has been fixed.
* Deleted sentences have been removed from the exported list of sentence lists.
* Added is_public field to the exported list of user lists.
* The data for the sentence review feature is now exported.

Monday, August 17, 2015

Tatoeba update (August 17th, 2015)

* Contributors can now adopt sentences from deactivated accounts.

* Contributors can now choose whether to display "(native)" next to sentences by self-identified native speakers.

* The settings page has been reorganized to include an "experimental" category.

* Contributors can now remove their profile picture. Previously, they could only replace it with a different one.

Monday, August 10, 2015

Tatoeba update (August 10th, 2015)

New feature: sentences collection/ratings

 This is a feature that has been discussed a lot, and you can find in the links more detailed information and discussions about this feature:
In short, you can now mark sentences as "OK", "not OK" or "unsure". There are dedicated buttons for it.
When you mark a sentence, it is added to your collection. You can view this collection from the menu under your username, in "My collection".
On the sentence's details page, you will be able to see who marked the sentence, and what rating it was given.

This feature is deactivated by default. In order to activate it, you will need to go to your settings, and check the option " Activate the feature to rate sentences and build your collection of sentences."

There is still a lot of work to be done but now it can be tested in real situations. So please use it and share your thoughts and ideas on how to make it better.

Native owner 

An indicator about the native level of the owner of a sentence is now displayed.

If the owner of a sentence mentioned in his or her profile that he or she is a native speaker of the language of the sentence, you will see "(native)" next to the username.

Monday, July 27, 2015

Tatoeba update (July 27th, 2015)

LANGUAGES
* Indonesian has been added as a user interface language.
* Emilian (for which we have a native contributor) has been added as a language.
* Zaza (for which we have a native contributor) has been added as a language.

SENTENCE CLEANUP
* In Macedonian sentences, all instances of Latin lowercase e grave have been replaced with the Cyrillic version.
* Byte-order marks, which are invisible but often prevent duplicate merging, have been removed and are now automatically stripped.

USER INTERFACE
* After linking a translation, the "Show X more translations" link did not work. This has been fixed.
* Adding a sentence to a set of favorites was not working. This has been fixed.

Monday, July 20, 2015

Tatoeba update (July 20th, 2015)

* SEARCH *
* Performing an advanced search without text keywords now works correctly when both the "fewest words first" option and the "Reverse order" checkbox are enabled.

* Performing an advanced search without text keywords now works correctly when the "Random order" option is selected.

* When searching in Hebrew, vowels are ignored, and final and non-final letters are treated as identical.

* Cyrillic characters that do not fall into the main Russian range are now handled correctly in searches.

* Previously, sentences that were recently translated might show up in a search for sentences without translations. This has been fixed.

* Previously, searches that were limited to sentences with indirect translations also found those with direct translations. This has been fixed.

* MISCELLANEOUS *
* The activity timeline now uses bar length exclusively, rather than bar length and color, to indicate the number of sentences added.

* The drop-down list displayed under a member's username has been changed. "My profile" has been added to the top, and "Edit profile" has been removed from the second position from the bottom.

* "Personal information" (name, country, birthday, homepage) and "Description" are now edited and saved together within a profile.

* Tooltips for the icons above a sentence were not displayed in certain browsers. This has been fixed.

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Tatoeba update (July 13th, 2015)

** Tatoeba update (July 13th, 2015) **

* It is now possible to set the language of a sentence to "unknown" when the language has been auto-detected.

* A duplicate link for translating a user's sentences has been removed.

* The "Show activity timeline" link has been moved from the home page to the "More" menu.

* The message for the case where no search results are found has been simplified.

* The edit icon for personal lists is no longer broken across two lines.

* Previously, specifying random order for a search without any content would result in a sort by number of words. Now it results in a truly random sort.

* Previously, when a user specified in an advanced search that sentences must be written by native speakers, the results would include sentences by non-natives as well. This has been fixed.

* The latest contributions for Toki Pona and CycL are now displayed again.

* Duplicate lines in the exported tags.csv file have been eliminated.

* In "Latest contributions", sentences in right-to-left languages are now displayed correctly.

* The names of several countries have been made more natural.

Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Tatoeba update (June 29th, 2015)

** Tatoeba update (June 29th, 2015) **

* Languages in drop-down lists (except the ones for adding a new sentence and adding a translation, which have not yet been changed) are now displayed in two parts: the user-specific languages at the top, and the other languages below. If a user is logged in, the user-specific languages are the ones in his or her profile. Otherwise, they are the ones most recently selected.
* Searching for sentences not translated into a particular language is now faster.
* The "has audio" icon is now displayed correctly for translations in lists.
* Previously, when an attempt was made to auto-detect the language for a sentence, and auto-detection failed, the sentence was not added. This has been fixed.
* Searching for a user's sentences in a given language used to cause an incorrect message to be displayed when no results were found. This has been fixed.

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Tatoeba update (June 22nd, 2015)

** Tatoeba update (June 22nd, 2015) **

* Searches *
** Searches can now use wildcard characters to match parts of a word. **
** Stress marks can now be excluded from searches in Russian. **
** There is a new button for clearing the search field between searches **

* Other changes *
** Users can now choose the number of sentences to display on a page. **
** Private messages can now be permanently deleted. **
** The date format has been internationalized. **
** Adopting or unadopting a sentence no longer causes extra translations to be displayed. **

Saturday, June 6, 2015

Tatoeba update (June 6th, 2015)

** Tatoeba update (June 6th, 2015) **

* Searching with mixed CJK/non-CJK characters now works.
* The number of lists displayed per page has been raised from 20 to 50.
* A user's profile page now contains a link that allows you to translate the user's sentences.
* Language codes are shown again on the page that lists the number of sentences per language.
* The number of sentences in a list is now displayed on that list's page (though due to a bug, the number may not be correct).
* The color of links has been changed.
* The OK tag is no longer automatically deleted when a sentence is released or adopted, but it is deleted when the text of the sentence changes.
* Most settings are now stored in the database rather than in cookies.
* Certain user interface strings whose translations had been dropped are now displayed as translated.
* Email addresses with new domains (such as ".technology") are now validated correctly.

Saturday, May 16, 2015

Tatoeba update (May 16th, 2015)

Improvements to sentence lists:

* The list of lists can now be sorted by list name, date created, or number of sentences.
* The lists are split into three sections: my lists, collaborative lists, other personal lists.
* Sentences can now be translated directly from any list.
* There is now a pencil icon next to the name of a list. Click on this icon to change the name.
* The creator of a list is now displayed on the list page.
* A sentence page now displays the names of the lists that include the sentence and are collaborative or belong to you.
* All the lists of a specific user can now be found via the user's profile. There is also a "My lists" link on the username menu and on the index/collaborative list pages.

Saturday, May 9, 2015

Tatoeba update (May 9th, 2015)

# Plurals #
* Improved handling of plurals in the user interface for languages such as Russian and Belarusian.

# Statistics #
​* The "Sentences by language" page was updated graphically. It still contains the same information as before.
* There are 2 new statistics pages:
** The number of members in each language for each level. This page can be accessed from the menu: "Members" > "Languages of members". Previously, this link was redirecting to a specific language (the one with the highest number of members). Now we can have global statistics.
** The number of native speakers in each language for each user status. This page can be accessed from the menu: "Members" > "Native speakers". The user status icons should be improved to work for color blind people. Suggestions are welcome.

# Miscellaneous #
* Improved furigana for words that start with a kana character.
* Updated the list of donations. Thanks to those who have contributed.

Saturday, May 2, 2015

Tatoeba update (May 2nd, 2015)

* You can now choose to restrict the list of languages for the "From" and "To" fields in a search query to the ones that you've listed in your profile. To enable this restriction, go to your settings and select the appropriate checkbox.

* The default level for a language that you add to your profile is now zero rather than unspecified.

* Unapproved sentences are displayed with a warning icon. Sidebar text about unapproved sentences has been removed.

* Hovering with the mouse over a tag will now show the name of the user who added it.

* Dynamic button labels that were not localized are localized now.



Saturday, April 25, 2015

Tatoeba update (April 25th, 2015)

# Redirection after registration:
* Instead of being redirected to the "Help" page after registering, users are redirected to the home page. They are shown a flash message that welcomes them and recommends that they add languages to their profile.

# Lists of languages:
* The dropdown lists for adding a new language, adding a translation, or changing the language of a sentence are restricted to the languages indicated in your profile.
* People who have not added any language in their profile will not see the form to add a sentence or translation. Instead, they will see a message with a button to go to the page to add a language.
* The "Auto detect" option appears only if there are two or more languages in the profile.

Sunday, April 19, 2015

Tatoeba update (April 19th, 2015)

Language code in URL

All the UI languages now use the same codes as the the rest of Tatoeba. This affects the following languages:
  • Chinese: chi → cnm
  • French: fre → fra
  • Greek: gre → ell
  • Portuguese (Brasil): pt_BR → por
URL's containing the previous language code will redirect to URL's with the new language code.

Users languages

The users languages are now exported into a CSV file. It contains the following fields:
  • language code
  • level
  • username
  • details

Update notes

As mentioned in the last update, I was looking for someone to replace me to write the update notes. Alan (AlanF_US) volunteered to take care of this task.

This will change a bit the organization of the updates. Up until now, the update notes were posted pretty much right after the update was done. In the next updates, the notes may be posted later, or sooner.

If you need to follow closely the changes we are implementing in Tatoeba, you can always follow what we are doing on GitHub, as explained in this wiki article:
http://en.wiki.tatoeba.org/articles/show/tatoeba-updates-get-involved

We will still need one or two more people for this task. This is not because writing update notes is a huge task, but because we need more people to acquire enough technical knowledge about Tatoeba to understand what we are doing in GitHub, and be able to communicate the changes that are made to those who have less technical knowledge.

Sunday, April 5, 2015

Tatoeba update (April 5th, 2015)

Admins can prevent users from adding new sentences and translations

We regularly have issues with users adding inappropriate sentences in Tatoeba, or sentences that don't meet the standards of the project.

To deal with such cases, admins can now disable access to the features of adding and translating sentences for a specified user. The user will still be able to log into Tatoeba, which will allow the admins (or other members) to still communicate with the user, but any sentence or translation that the user will try to submit will be rejected.

If you notice a user whose contributions should be restricted, please contact the admins at the following address: community-admins@tatoeba.org. Avoid posting about it on the Wall or in comments on sentences since the user you are mentioning may feel offended and cause us more trouble.

Name of country translated

The name of the country displayed in the profile is now translated in the other languages of the interface.

Looking for someone to write the update notes

I am looking for someone who can replace me to write the update notes that I post every week, whenever Tatoeba is updated (like this one that you are reading).

If there is no one, then there will simply be no more update notes. Users will still be able to get information about what changed for each update, but the information will not necessarily be formatted in a user-friendly way.

If you are interested in taking this role, please send me (Trang) a private message on Tatoeba. Thank you.

Saturday, March 28, 2015

Tatoeba update (March 28th, 2015)

Users languages

Last week we introduced the possibility for users to indicate their languages. This week, we have a page that lists the users for each language. You can find it under "Members" > "Languages of members" in the menu.

Collapsible translations

You have now the option to hide translations when there are too many. You can enable it in your settings by checking "".

When this option is on, you will see a link "Show more translations" on sentences that have more than 5 translations. Clicking on the link will display the hidden translations.

This option is turned off by default for logged in users because it still needs some improvements. The order in which translations are displayed is based on the language ISO code. It means that the displayed translations are not necessarily the ones you will be the most interested in. The plan is to display in priority translations in the languages that you have added in your profile.

Saturday, March 21, 2015

Tatoeba update (March 21st, 2015)

Language levels in profile

We have an important new feature: you can now indicate in your profile the languages that you speak, learn or are interested in! We highly encourage everyone to list their languages in their profile with this new feature.

Many contributors have already indicated their languages in their profile description, but the information can now be stored in a more structured way, which will be useful to build other features around it:
  • We can customize the languages displayed in the dropdown lists, and only display the languages that you have added in your profile.
  • We can sort the translations to display in priority sentences in the languages that you know.
  • We can sort the search results to give more priority to sentences added by native speakers.
  • We can display the main language(s) of each contributor in the members list, or in the comments header, or in the sentences header.
  • And so on...

HTTPS

Tatoeba now supports HTTPS: https://tatoeba.org.

Website interface

The website interface is now available in Lojban.

Saturday, March 14, 2015

Tatoeba update (March 14th, 2015)

Tags

A search feature has been added for tags. You can filter the tags on the tags page to display only tags containing a certain string.

Homepage

The homepage has been updated. Users who are logged in will not see any difference. Users who are not logged in will now see the same thing as logged in users, with an additional block containing the description of Tatoeba, and buttons to log in or register.

Edit in place for new translations

It is now possible again to edit a translation right after adding it, by clicking on it.

Sentence comment form

The comment form was not displayed pages of sentences that have no log. This has been fixed.

New languages

2 new languages have been added: Khasi (added last week) and Javanese.

Tatoeba days

This is an early announcement that we're planning to organize a regular event that we will call "Tatoeba day". The main idea is to have, every once in a while, one day where we gather and work together on improving Tatoeba.

The format of the event is not clearly defined so we would like to know your thoughts about this idea. Also, if you would like to help in the organization of such an event, please let us know.

Saturday, March 7, 2015

Tatoeba update (March 7th, 2015)

Bug fixes

  • An error message is now displayed when trying to view a Wall message that doesn't exist.
  • Special characters in the name in the profile are now properly displayed.

Google Summer of Code 2015 

Sadly our application for GSoC has been rejected. It seems Google had to lower significantly the number of participants this year. There were only 137 accepted organizations, compared to 190 last year, or 177 the year before.

The good news is that thanks to our participation last year, Tatoeba got a bit of visibility amongst young developers and has attracted a few students who expressed interest to stay involved in the project in the long term.

We will of course apply again the next year, and the next ones. If you have heard of any other interesting program Tatoeba could apply to, please let us know.

Meanwhile we will consider if we can use the money from donations to organize our own program. So stay tuned :)

Saturday, February 28, 2015

Tatoeba update (February 28th, 2015)

Top menu

  • The icons in the top menu have been updated.
  • The "Random sentence" under the "Browse" menu item has been moved to the 1st position in the list.

Tags

  • The page that lists all the tags has now pagination.
  • The tags can be sorted by name and by count.

Saturday, February 21, 2015

Tatoeba update (February 21st, 2015)

Sentences translation feature

The design of the translation form has been reviewed.
  • Labels have been added for each input field.
  • The buttons have been styled to match the ones in the comments form.
  • The corresponding language icon is displayed next to the dropdown list when selecting a language.

Sentences edit feature

  • Clicking on a sentence will no more open the edit form.
  • An "edit" button has been added next to the "translate" button.
  • The button is displayed only on sentences that you can edit.
  • If the sentence has audio, the edit button will displayed but disabled. You cannot edit sentences that have audio.
  • The buttons have also been styled to match the ones in the comments and the position of the textarea has been fixed (it used to appear one line below, instead of appearing where the sentence text is).

Other

  • The shortcuts to navigate to the previous or next page (Ctrl + arrow key) are no more triggered when typing in a message.
  • The logo has slightly changed. We now have an SVG version of the logo.

Saturday, February 14, 2015

Tatoeba update (February 14th, 2015)

User interface

  • On pages with pagination, such as the Wall, you can navigate to the previous or next page with [Ctrl + →] or [Ctrl + ← ]. Note: on Mac it's [Ctrl + Shift + arrow key].
  • The "Browse" item in the top menu does not link to a random sentence anymore. We have added instead a sub-item ("Random sentence") for this purpose. This should make the sub-menu accessible for most people using a mobile device.
  • The icon that indicates whether a Chinese sentence is written with simplified or traditional characters has been restored. This icon has also been added for Cantonese and Shanghainese.
  • We fixed an issue where CJK characters were not displayed with the correct glyph.

Users can deleted their own sentences

Anyone can now delete their own sentence, if (and only if) it doesn't have any translation.
You will not need to ask a corpus maintainer to delete your sentences anymore, when you have added a sentence by mistake.

Other

  • When a sentence is tagged 'OK', the tag is removed when the sentence is modified. Note: if you are editing a sentence from the sentence's page, you may notice that the tag remains even after you have edited it. This is normal. You will need to refresh the page to see it disappear.
  • In some situations, logging in systematically redirects to the homepage. We changed the redirection to lead instead to the last page viewed before attempting to log in.
  • Email notifications subjects are now encoded properly.

Wall messages re-imported

The Wall messages that were lost during a server crash have been re-imported.

Google Summer of Code 2015

We are preparing to apply as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2015. We will submit our application some time this weekend, and we will know on March 2 if we are accepted or not.

Even if we are not yet officially part of GSoC 2015, a wave of students already started contacted us. Some of them have even contributed code that has been released:
  • the keyboard shortcuts to navigate from page to page
  • the "Random sentence" sub-item in the menu
  • the clickable arrow icon in the search bar, to swap languages (released last week)
And there's more to come :)

Saturday, February 7, 2015

Tatoeba update (February 7th, 2015)

Search

  • It's now possible to search words with the dot, comma and apostrophe symbols in Lojban.
  • There is no more distinction between half-width and full-width characters. Searching half-width characters (for instance 10) and full-width characters (for instance 10) will return the same results. This  covers Japanese kanas, Korean hangul, and Latin alphabet.
  • Non-CJK words are now searchable in sentences of CJK-based languages.
Note: The full/half-width and non-CJK searches modifications are not applied yet. They will be applied tomorrow when the corpus is fully re-indexed.

UI fixes and improvements

  • Clicking on the arrow in the search bar will swap the "from" and "to" languages.
  • Pressing enter when adding a sentence while using an IME will no more submit the sentence.

Wall messages lost in crash re-importation

A while back we had a crash where all the messages on the Wall got lost. We had some backup but the data in the backup was not structured in a way that would enable an easy restoration of the messages.

Gillux worked on a way to reimport them and the script is now ready. It is not scheduled yet, but you should be aware that Tatoeba will be under maintenance for a short time (around half an hour) when we reimport the messages.

Saturday, January 31, 2015

Tatoeba update (January 31st, 2015)

UI Improvements

  • We changed the position of the language icons. It is now displayed on the left of the sentence.
  • The link/unlink button (accessible only for advanced contributors) is displayed between the language icon and the sentence's text.
  • A button to hide/show replies on the Wall has been added.

Empty search

Searching for an empty string would redirect you to a message saying "Please enter a nonempty search string".
The search feature has been modified so that searching an empty string will instead display all the sentences.

This feature works also with the language filters, so you can search for from Bulgarian, and it will display all the sentences in Bulgarian. You can as well search from Bulgarian to English, and it will display all the sentences in Bulgarian that have a translation in English.

Note that there is still a limitation of 1000 results. The count will display the total number of results but you will not be able to browse through all the results, only the 1000 first ones.

Saturday, January 24, 2015

Tatoeba update (January 24th, 2015)

Sentences with audio are locked

From now on, sentences cannot be deleted or edited if they have audio. We consider that a sentence that has audio can safely be considered as correct and has no reason to be changed or deleted.

Admins can still remove the audio from the sentence, and therefore make it editable and deletable again, if it turns out that the sentence did have a mistake after all.

UI fixes

  • For advanced contributors: the link/unlink button has moved to be placed before the arrow. Users reported that having the link/unlink button next to the text could lead them more often to link or unlink by mistake than to have the button completely to the left.
  • The sentence link (that is automatically generated when you type #123 for instance) now works also when you have punctuation before the #. For instance if your comment contains a parenthesis before the #, like (#123), it will now display the link properly.
  • Linking sentences from the "Browse by language" when a language is selected in "Show translations in" will no more display all translations after linking, but only show translations in the language selected.

New language

A language has been: Eastern Punjabi. We actually had the language "Punjabi" but it mistakenly contained sentences in Eastern Punjabi while it was meant to be Western Punjabi.
There fore "Punjabi" was renamed to "Punjabi (Western)" and "Punjabi (Eastern)" has been added.

Sunday, January 18, 2015

Tatoeba update (January 18th, 2015)

Sentences new design

We've redesigned a bit the sentences.

The initial goal was to make the texts non-clickable, in order to ease the process of copy-pasting a part of a sentence. In order to navigate to a sentence, you will now need to click on the # icon (for the main sentence), or the arrow icon (for the translations).

All the icons have been changed in order to use images in SVG. We're trying to slowly transition towards this format for all our icons.

The "adopt" button has been moved to be placed next to the name of the owner of the sentence.

There is still something left to do: at the moment if you are the owner of a sentence, clicking on it will display the form to edit it. We want to replace this mechanism and add an edit button on which you would click to edit the sentence.

Sentences deduplication

This wasn't easy work but the sentences deduplication script is finally ready to run on the real website.

You can thank saeb (aka. lool0 on IRC). He's the one who wrote most of the script.

Before we can run the script, there is one last thing to do: fix the time on the server. We will need to shut down Tatoeba for a few minutes. But we will do this when there is less traffic.

In any case you can expect the script to be running on Monday :)

Google Summer of Code 2015

We are preparing to apply for Google Summer of Code 2015. We participated last year (for the first time) and had 4 students working on projects related to Tatoeba. We hope to get to participate again this year.

We are in the phase of defining ideas of projects for students. If you have an idea, please don't hesitate to submit it to us. You can submit ideas also by replying to my message on the Wall.

On a side note, if you are interested in being a mentor (this requires to have programming knowledge), please let us know in the related thread on the Tatoeba Google group, or contact us at team@tatoeba.org.