Version at: 12/09/2013, 02:38

The Tatoeba corpus is effectively a set of sentences and a set of links between them. Whenever a sentence is translated, a link is automatically created between the source and the translation. Sometimes, however, a translation already exists in the corpus. In this case, the ideal thing to do is to link to that translation. 

*(Another option is to create a duplicate version of the sentence and wait for the periodically executed deduplication script to unify the sentences. However, this is less desirable since merging two sentences, their existing links, and their existing comment threads may create technical problems and confusion, and because the script must be run manually.)*

Since linking indiscriminately can be destructive, the privilege to create and destroy links is reserved to advanced contributors, corpus maintainers, and admins. Once a contributor is promoted to an advanced contributor, he or she will begin seeing chain and scissor icons. Clicking on the chain icon links a pair of sentences, and clicking on the scissors icon unlinks it. This is quite straightforward. 

However, the chain icon is only displayed for indirect translations. An indirect translation is a pair of sentences that are not directly linked, but have an end-to-end series of direct translations between them. 

version at: 12/09/2013, 02:52

The Tatoeba corpus is stored as a set of sentences and a set of links between them. Whenever a sentence is translated, a link is automatically created between the source and the translation. Sometimes, however, a translation already exists in the corpus. In this case, the ideal thing to do is to link to that translation.*

Since linking indiscriminately can be destructive, the privilege to create and destroy links is reserved to advanced contributors, corpus maintainers, and admins. Once a contributor is promoted to an advanced contributor, he or she will begin seeing chain and scissor icons. Clicking on the chain icon links a pair of sentences, and clicking on the scissors icon unlinks it. This is quite straightforward. 

However, the chain icon is only displayed for indirect translations. An indirect translation is a pair of sentences that are not directly linked, but have an end-to-end series of direct translations between them. Often indirect translations can be made into direct translations, but there are many exceptions. Sometimes all the direct translations in a series are valid but the ends of the chain should not be linked. This may happen when some languages in the sentence chain make a distinction between, say, verb forms based on gender, while others collapse those differences. (It may also happen when there is a bad link somewhere in the chain.)


**An alternative to linking to an existing sentence is to create a duplicate version of the sentence and wait for the periodically executed deduplication script to unify the sentences. This is less desirable since merging two sentences, their existing links, and their existing comment threads may create technical problems and confusion, and because the script must be run manually. For this reason, regular contributors are encouraged to leave comments asking advanced contributors to create links, rather than to create duplicate sentences.*

Note

The lines in green are the lines that have been added in the new version. The lines in red are those that have been removed.