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Bookmarklets

A bookmarklet is a tool that you can keep on your bookmarks bar that performs an action when you click on it. Using a bookmarklet is the best way for an advanced contributor to link sentences that are not already indirectly linked. See Introduction to Linking.

To install a Tatoeba bookmarklet easily, see "Drag-and-Drop" immediately below. For a more involved procedure, see "Build Bookmarklet from Scratch".

See "Sample Workflow Using a Bookmarklet" for a description of how a bookmarklet can fit into your workflow for linking sentences.

Drag-and-Drop

If your bookmarks/favorites toolbar is not displayed already, open it by right-clicking in the toolbar area and checking "Bookmarks Toolbar" or "Favorites Toolbar". Then go to Tools for Tatoeba.org Members and drag one or more bookmarklets from the top of the page to your bookmarks toolbar. You will probably find that "Link to this Sentence - A" is the easiest one to use.

Build a Custom Bookmarklet from Scratch

If you want to build a custom bookmarklet from scratch rather than drag-and-drop a premade one, create a bookmark from any web page, set the "Location" or "URL" field to the bookmarklet string (which you can find here) and change the name as desired. This should not be necessary for most people, however.

Sample Workflow Using a Bookmarklet

Let's say that you have copied the "Link to this sentence - A" bookmarklet to your bookmark bar, and now you're working from a list of sentences that have not been translated from language A to language B. You see that two sentences on the page, sentence 1 and sentence 2, have the same translation in language B. (This happens frequently, for instance, when translating from a language whose verb forms change according to the gender of the subject into a language whose verb forms do not.) You can use a procedure like this:

(1) Translate sentence 1 into language B without leaving the page.

(2) Right-click on the green bent arrow next to your new translation and copy the URL ("Copy Link Location" in Mozilla Firefox, "Copy shortcut" in Internet Explorer, "Copy link address" in Google Chrome).

(3) Right-click on the round blue "i" icon next to sentence 2 and select "Open in new tab" or "Open in new window".

(4) In that new tab or window, click on the "Link to this sentence" bookmarklet. When prompted for a URL or ID, paste in the one you copied in step 2 and hit Enter.

(5) If all went well, you will see the link you wanted to create and a message saying that the sentences have been successfully linked. (Otherwise, you will see an error message.)

See Also

See the Wikipedia page on bookmarklets or this short introduction for more details on bookmarklets in general.