Trang Ho Tatoeba Presenting at the Paris event Drumbeat

Okay… so… my project is about…

My project is called Tatoeba

and is about learning languages.

So briefly, it's a dictionary of sentences

multilingual, collaborative and free.

So why a sentence dictionary?

One has to distinguish…

Currently, online dictionaries are

dictionaries that are based on words.

That is, you have words and the translation of this word

in a foreign language.

On the contrary, what is missing much,

are the example sentences.

There are not always,

example sentences when one is looking up a word.

As a result of finding this, I wanted to create a tool

which would mainly focus on the sentences.

So… Something that collects many sentences,

and that would translated into foreign languages.

The second aspect: "multilingual":

Tatoeba is really a dictionary

of multilingual sentences.

… Multilingual in the sense.

You don't only have French-English,

and Spanish-English, and German-English.

All languages are really

interconnected with each other.

When someone adds a sentence to the system,

for example a… Finnish sentence,

and when someone else translates it into English

and when someone else translated into Vietnamese,

you'd indirectly receive the Finnish-Vietnamese relationship.

So you have connections… You quickly get content

where pairs of languages

that are very… whose content is very hard to find

currently on the web.

So that's the multilingual aspect;

Then there is the aspect "collaborative":

As you can imagine, it's not something… that… that finally the goal is to build

a big, big database of sentences.

This can't be done by one person,

this has to be done by a whole community.

So, anyone can come and

add sentences, even without knowing they translate;

translate sentences and correct sentences of others.

Because as it is User-generated

people sometimes make mistakes.

So the community is correcting itself.

And last thing is "free":

That is, all sentences that we collect;

They can be downloaded by anyone.

They are modifiable, redistributable of course.

You can do whatever you want to do;

it's licensed under Creative Commons.

The goal… The goal is really to see the emergence of

new types of tools on the web.

New types of tools for language learning.

Because, in my opinion, what exists

at the moment fall short of

the potential of digital technology and the potential of the web.

And the problem is that the raw data

at the base ... there are none.

So nobody… everyone…

Anyone who has a really great idea

for something great

for language learning

would have to build up the entire contents on his own

and therefore I want to do this work

to allow all those who have

great ideas to build their applications

and improve the web for language learning.

☺