Lost in Translation?

Clozemaster
#1

I’ve recently taken up studying Finnish again, after a longish hiatus, and in the process I’ve come to appreciate the value of the “legacy” old-school Tatoeba-based corpus, as the Finnish language mappings I use have not had the addition of the “new” Fast Track, nor the AI images.

I thus appreciate that every sentence is searchable, and that I can always use the source link to see the sentence on Tatoeba. The latter means that I can check whether there are other, parallel translations of the same sentence; this is probably what I miss most in the new collections, where there’s only one translation for each sentence. Also, having access to the Tatoeba source means that I can sometimes check with the author of the sentence or translation, whereas the new collections are anonymous and impersonal.

So if I was about to start from the beginning with some language, I would stay clear of the new Fast Track until I had acquired a good basis using the “legacy” collections. I do see merit, though, in the new specialized collections that don’t have any Tatoeba counterpart, such as Idioms, Reading the News, etc, despite the above-mentioned shortcomings.

What do you think?

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#2

Couldn’t agree more!

1 Like
#3

For me, the advantages of the new Fast Track are:

  1. It is broken into reasonable 1000-cloze chunks. Psychologically, the old enormous Fast Track was intimidating.
  2. It has been proofread more than the Legacy. (Or so the admins have told us.)

I see the Fast Track mainly in terms of convenience. I just want a pre-made, reasonably error-free collection of statistically common phrases/words to work on, without having to do a lot of outside research at Tatoeba, etc. I want to finish up the Fast Track as quickly as possible and move on to my own collections, which I have made from books I have read in my target language.

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