Guidelines for Editing Japanese Sentences in Tatoeba

Introduction

These guidelines, which have been prepared by Jim Breen, are intended to help Japanese speakers who are reading and assessing the sentences.

Many of the the Japanese-English pairs of sentences in the Tatoeba database come from the earlier Tanaka Corpus, which was compiled in Japan by the late Professor Tanaka and his students. The sentence pairs are used in many online dictionary sites and dictionary apps to provide examples of usage of Japanese terms. To enable this, a set of indices are maintained for many of the Japanese sentences. See here for a description of this. These indices are maintained within the Tatoeba project.

It is important that any modifications made to the Japanese sentences avoid disrupting the indexing system. Jim Breen, who distributes the indices, monitors the changes to the Japanese sentences and adjusts the indices. At present about 50-70 sentences are changed each week, and Jim has to update the indices manually for those sentences, so it is important that changes be kept to a reasonable number.

Guidelines to Updating Japanese Sentences

The following guidelines should be followed when changing the Japanese sentences:

We greatly appreciate Japanese speakers reading and adopting these sentences, which lets people in the project know that a native speaker has "given their stamp of approval."

Jim Breen
June 2021