Tatoeba: A bridge between languages.
What is Tatoeba?
Tatoeba is a language dictionary.
You can search words
and get translations.
But it's not exactly a typical dictionary.
It's all about sentences,
Not words.
You can search sentences containing a certain word
And get translations for these sentences.
"Why sentences?" you may ask.
Well, because, sentences are more interesting.
Sentences bring context to the words.
Sentences have personalities.
They can be funny, smart, silly
insightful, touching,
hurtful.
Sentences can teach us a lot,
and a lot more than just words.
So we love sentences.
But, even more, we love languages.
And what we really want is to have many sentences
in many—and any—languages.
This is why Tatoeba is multilingual.
But not that kind of multilingual—
not the kind where languages
are being simply paired up together,
and where some pairs are left behind.
Tatoeba is really multilingual.
All the languages are interconnected.
If an Icelandic sentence has a translation in English,
and the English sentence has a translation in Swahili,
then indirectly, this will provide a Swahili translation
for the Icelandic sentence.
Languages that would have never found themselves together in a traditional system
can be connected in Tatoeba.
Awesome, right?
But, where do we get the sentences?
And how do we translate them?
Obviously, this cannot be the work of one person.
This is why Tatoeba is collaborative.
Everyone is free to contribute.
And everyone has the ability to contribute.
It doesn't require you to be a polyglot.
Everyone speaks a language.
Everyone can feed the database
to illustrate new vocabulary.
Everyone can help ensure that sentences sound correct,
and are correctly spelled.
And actually, this project needs everyone.
Languages are not carved in stone.
Languages live through all of us.
We want to capture all the uniqueness of each language.
And we want to capture their evolution through time.
But you know, it would be sad
to collect all these sentences and keep them for ourselves.
Because there's so much you can do with them.
Which is why Tatoeba is open.
Our source code is open,
Our data is open.
We're releasing all the sentences we collect
under the Creative Commons Attribution license.
This means you can reuse them freely for a textbook,
for an application,
for a research project,
for anything!
So that's Tatoeba,
But that's not the whole picture.
Tatoeba is not just an open, collaborative,
multilingual dictionary of sentences.
It's part of an ecosystem that we want to build.
We want to bring language tools to the next level.
We want to see innovation in the language learning landscape.
And this cannot happen without open language resources
which cannot be built without a community,
which cannot contribute without efficient platforms.
So ultimately, with Tatoeba,
we are only building the foundations
to make the Web
a better place for language learning.