The most I work through the course the more realize what is wrong with the translations. It’s been well translated from English into Polish by a native English speaker than from Polish into English by a native Polish speaker.
I can see what the original phrase was in English by the translator does not.
My understanding is that the source of the sentences is the Tatoeba site. The site is contributed to by a multitude of people. Some of these will be native Polish speakers, some not. This might explain the varying quality of the source material used on Clozemaster.
If you find any errors in either a Polish original sentence or the English translation, it would be a good idea to use the reporting facility which can be seen with every Clozemaster sentence. Any reported sentences are checked by a native Polish speaker who also has an excellent command of English and he will make any changes that he deems necessary. Using this process can help improve the quality of the material on Clozemaster.
One addition that would be useful for the site would be a tagging facility, whereby any reported sentences that had been already verified by the moderator could be marked as such e.g. ‘Verified by Clozemaster’ or just a simple green ‘V’ sign, against both the original sentence and the translation. That way, users could have confidence in the quality of a sentence they weren’t perhaps sure about. I think I’ll raise this on the appropriate part of the forum.
Best Wishes, Alex
Well I’ve done hundreds of corrections - but never got any feed back. Is this normal?
What is interesting is that whoever does the Polish to English translation does not understand English idioms. The Polish is often a direct/literal translation of an English idiom, the Polish is then translated into another English idiom that only loosely approximates the original
Hi,
Sometimes I have received feedback (appeared to be some kind of automated email) about reported sentences that have been checked, sometimes not. I have not received any feedback for several months now, so perhaps the process for providing feedback has been pulled for further development, as there were some issues with it … but I’m just guessing.
I know that the Polish gentleman who moderates the reported sentences is extremely knowledgeable, with both Polish and English (he’s a professional interpreter), so I trust him to make changes only when he deems them necessary. It would be great to get individual feedback for every sentence that I’d reported but I doubt that he would have the time to do that, as he must have to deal with thousands of reported sentences, as well as do his day job.
If you have some concerns about the error correction feedback system, you might want to raise them in the ‘Questions, Suggestions, Feedback’ section. The owners of the site are genuinely keen to hear about any suggested improvements to the site.
I raised the suggestion with them about marking verified sentences as such (see above) and the site owner/administrator replied to say that a ticket had been raised for this. Hopefully, this will come to fruition and soon, as it will give users more confidence in the course material, as well as save the moderator a lot of time in not having to re-check sentences that he has already worked on.
Best Wishes, Alex