I have been working through the 20,000 Ukrainian words course made by @pastaforeveryone at this URL:
However, the English translations are (as the description admits) supplied via Google Translate. Obviously, that is far from perfect, and results in many identical translations and loss of nuance, so that one has to guess which ‘as’ or ‘like’ or ‘to’ is meant. It also lacks tags for parts of speech, so when given the meaning ‘last’ one does not know whether it’s the adjective or the verb, etc.
I am highly motivated to improve the course, and have native speakers of Ukrainian eager to provide proper translations and tagging of parts of speech. I see the course is not an official Memrise one, and that it was created on the basis of a freely-licensed wordlist, so I can obviously create my own version based on that word list and provide better translations, but I think it would be better, and less confusing to future learners, to improve the original course than to offer another version of it.
Can I be made collaborator on the course?
The FAQ also said to tag an admin on such requests, so I’m randomly tagging @Joshua, the first admin I ran across.
Hi all,
Thanks for the tag, nice to hear from you as always
Sorry to keep you waiting. Since my colleague @MemriseMatty has taken over all support-related tasks from me, it can sometimes take me a few days to notice your tags and messages.
I have added @abartov as a contributor as well as contacted the course creator and the course contributor.
Both have been invited to this thread so hopefully they can join us here soon.
Speak soon,
Lien
Thanks for adding @abartov, @Lien
Is there anything here that I can help with?
Also, should I have received a notification when this post was first made? It looks like I was tagged but never received a notification.
@pastaforeveryone - I did assume you’d get a ping with my mention. I’m sorry to hear you didn’t.
My goals are:
improve the translations using a proper dictionary rather than Google Translate as well as verification by educated native speakers.
Add and populate the ‘part of speech’ attribute column. (I have added PoS to the first few words, you can see.)
Add and populate a ‘gender’ attribute column for noting the grammatical gender of nominal forms. This I am not able to do for some reason: the AJAX call to ‘structure_add’ seems to be encountering a 403 error with the message ‘You cannot edit this pool.’ Any idea what’s wrong?
@pastaforeveryone - if you’d like to help with this effort, we can divide the work between us (say, by “level”). Let me know. If you aren’t interested or can’t make the time, I’m happy to plug away at it on my own.
I don’t have time to work on this project any more, but I’m glad to hear you’d like to improve the course
My Ukrainian is very much beginner level anyway, so I probably would not be much help with this effort. I had generated the course by writing software to parse a frequency ordered list of Ukrainian words, query Google’s Translate API, then store the results in the format necessary to upload to Memrise.
Unfortunately this resulted in far from perfect translations that I didn’t have the knowledge necessary to improve upon. Thank you for being willing to pick up the torch
Regarding the problem adding a column, this thread suggests I won’t be able to as I’m not the ‘creator’:
Is that so? I’m confused, because I seem to have been able to add the Part of Speech column.
Could @Lien or @MemriseMatty or someone else confirm? And if that’s the case, and given pastaforeveryone’s statement that they are happy for me to pick up the torch and maintain the course, is there a way to change my role in the course to ‘creator’? If not, is the only workaround to recreate the course myself?
Contributors have limited access to course settings, more details here.
If you would like to implement any changes that require creator/staff status, please let me know and I’ll take care of it for you.
