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Okay… so… my project is about…
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My project is called Tatoeba
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and is about learning languages.
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So briefly, it's a dictionary of sentences
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multilingual, collaborative and free.
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So why a sentence dictionary?
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One has to distinguish…
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Currently, online dictionaries are
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dictionaries that are based on words.
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That is, you have words and the translation of this word
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in a foreign language.
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On the contrary, what is missing much,
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are the example sentences.
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There are not always,
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example sentences when one is looking up a word.
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As a result of finding this, I wanted to create a tool
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which would mainly focus on the sentences.
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So… Something that collects many sentences,
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and that would translated into foreign languages.
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The second aspect: "multilingual":
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Tatoeba is really a dictionary
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of multilingual sentences.
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… Multilingual in the sense.
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You don't only have French-English,
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and Spanish-English, and German-English.
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All languages are really
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interconnected with each other.
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When someone adds a sentence to the system,
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for example a… Finnish sentence,
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and when someone else translates it into English
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and when someone else translated into Vietnamese,
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you'd indirectly receive the Finnish-Vietnamese relationship.
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So you have connections… You quickly get content
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where pairs of languages
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that are very… whose content is very hard to find
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currently on the web.
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So that's the multilingual aspect;
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Then there is the aspect "collaborative":
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As you can imagine, it's not something… that… that finally the goal is to build
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a big, big database of sentences.
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This can't be done by one person,
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this has to be done by a whole community.
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So, anyone can come and
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add sentences, even without knowing they translate;
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translate sentences and correct sentences of others.
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Because as it is User-generated
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people sometimes make mistakes.
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So the community is correcting itself.
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And last thing is "free":
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That is, all sentences that we collect;
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They can be downloaded by anyone.
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They are modifiable, redistributable of course.
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You can do whatever you want to do;
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it's licensed under Creative Commons.
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The goal… The goal is really to see the emergence of
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new types of tools on the web.
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New types of tools for language learning.
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Because, in my opinion, what exists
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at the moment fall short of
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the potential of digital technology and the potential of the web.
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And the problem is that the raw data
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at the base ... there are none.
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So nobody… everyone…
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Anyone who has a really great idea
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for something great
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for language learning
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would have to build up the entire contents on his own
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and therefore I want to do this work
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to allow all those who have
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great ideas to build their applications
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and improve the web for language learning.
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☺