jiru
commented
3 years ago Hi @DarkTrick, nice to meet you and welcome here. :slightly_smiling_face:
About your suggestion of prefilling the translation field with a machine translation. While I agree about the benefits you mentioned (especially for short and simple sentences and close language pairs), I can see some drawbacks.
When thinking about a how to translate something, what if you would have come up with a better translation than Google, but just because Google suggested you with something that was "not perfect, but good enough", you accepted it without figuring out how to improve. In general, whatever is set as "default" has a great deal of influence over the outcome of a user experience.
On a more conceptual level, I believe what makes Tatoeba’s sentences unique and valuable is that they are written by human beings, not machines. Even if we are just talking about prefilling the field, I am afraid Tatoeba would loose some of its reputation if we introduce machine translations one way or another.
Finally, because Tatoeba is a community of language enthusiasts including professional translators, I can imagine many members have a strong opinion about machine translations, be it pro or against. Implementing your suggestion would need to discussed with the community and it is likely cause some hot debates.
Story or Context and Example
When I'm translating sentences, I figured, that most of the time google-translated sentences perfectly fit - or are sometimes even better than what I come up with at first. So, most of the time, I think up a translation, copy-paste to Google Translate, copy-paste its translation and make minor (or no) adjustments.
Idea It would be very helpful, if, when clicking the
translate sentencebutton, Tatoeba could prefill the field with a translation from Google Translate.I'm aware, that this might go wrong for longer, more complex sentences. But for most sentences like these it should work perfectly fine.