, in its most basic form, is a large database of sentences translated into multiple languages. Users can search the database for sentences that contain certain words or express a certain meaning, and get a translation into up to 83 languages. The translated sentences are created by volunteer users across the globe. On any given day, approximately 1000 new translations are created by the user base, with more expected as new volunteers join the project.
Tatoeba is unique as a translation service because it is not word-driven – it is much easier for the average translator to create a sentence with a parallel meaning in another language than to construct a translation based on words and endings, which also requires a computer to know the grammatical rules of a language in order to put the words together. Translating languages by entire sentences is an approach which is not frequently employed in machine translation, and could be a step toward building better and more accurate translators.
The translated sentences offered by Tatoeba have a number of potential uses – promoting products or services in another language, practicing language-learning skills on the web, or collecting example sentences from a language for linguistic analysis. Foreign language teachers can assign their students to collect examples from Tatoeba, or even contribute to the project themselves. Tatoeba also keeps endangered languages alive by allowing speakers of the language to create their own database of translations without the mediation of a linguist.
Tatoeba also has promising avenues for collaborative projects, including localizing software projects and integrating with other language-learning and translation projects like the .
-LBC
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