Who's to Judge a Language?

About 2 weeks ago, my group mates and I were struggling with an assignment about annotating a corpus, and we had a presentation and blah blah blah. The main point I want to drive at is that, our professor came up to us and told us that we can gain extra credits if we can improve the flawed sentences on the corpus. Okay, so that was what I did, improving sentences on the corpus, and what I got back is a heap load of rubbish and a total ruination of my pride. I don't even think I know ENGLISH anymore. 

So what happened was that we had to annotate and tag word senses in a corpus, any corpus. We chose T*****a corpus (I don't wanna get into trouble here) as it is a multilingual corpus and seem very interesting to us budding multilingual linguists. We, however, faced problems while annotating the sentences because some of the sentences seem erroneous and sadly to say, some are downright horrendous as they are direct translations. Our professor hence told us to correct whatever sentences which we felt are wrong to improve the corpus as a whole and yada yada. 

And so I did. 

I made a total of 78 contributions to the corpus, mostly are comments of which I think the sentences didn't sound right and needed to be changed. For sentences which are not owned by anyone, I could basically adopt it, make it mine and correct it. HALLELUJAH, that was when hell came. 

After one night of editing certain sentences which I felt was wrong, I was greeted with 15 emails from strangers T*****a's war troops the next morning telling me how they don't feel a need to change their awkward-sounding sentences or that I must change my corrected sentences for the original ones are correct. 

Here are just some print-screens of my mortifying experiences with the evils of this earth. Of course, to protect the privacy of my enemies-in-war, I've sprayed paint on their names (If only I could do the same to their faces).

'She died for a lack of air.' This sentence sounds weird, agree? 

I commented on suggesting a change. but those ever-helpful front line troops replied after I commented on changing the sentence to a less awkward-sounding one. 

Well, not only is he/she indirectly saying that I'm stupid for not knowing that the original sentence 'is fine', he/she is trying to tell me that my vocab sucks too for not knowing the word 'asphyxia'.

Next is a really weird sentence that I've never ever come across before in the twenty one years of my life. 

Does that English sentence even makes sense to you? It seems so ungrammatical to me. The Chinese translation of it doesn't tally too.

So, the backside-itchy me went to change the sentence to "No sooner had I left it began to rain."

Then, I received an email notification telling me that someone commented on my sentence. The person not only commented once, but twice. Twice on how my English sucked and I should go right to hell for having such bad English.

As seen from above, I was trying to understand what is so 'right' about the original sentence, so I commented on whether the comparative 'than' should be the chronological 'then' instead. 

BUT NO. 

Someone smart came and rescued his fellow trooper by telling me straight in the face, 'No, it's "than"'. 

OKAY POINT TAKEN. 

What I didn't know was that people are really so free to stay on T*****a's website forever and go through all the comments/changes that others make. Yes, I received another comment on my change.

I hate my life.

 Now, You must be wondering, so what's the original sentence?

Here you go. Don't be too shocked though, cos' I'm just a student and am unable to pay your medical bills if anything were to happen to you.

My work is to do redundant things and make myself a laughing stock.

Okay, I proposed 'My sister works as an English teacher', but that was mercilessly shot down by those ever-protective soldiers of T*****a. 

WHAT A DUMB ASS I AM TO NOT KNOW THAT THE BEST TRANSLATION FOR ‘我姐姐是个英文老师’ is 'My sister's work is teaching English' (and we are from China). 

Next one is an epic. It is such an epic that I now declare myself a failure in the English language. 

Check out the sentence is:

 Wah I swear when I first saw this sentence in T*****a, I was laughing so hard I couldn't feel my cheeks for the next five minutes. 

But when replies and comments came in to my change of the sentence, I couldn't laugh anymore. I cried. I cried for the inabilities for being able to see the beauty of the English language. Here are the comments I received.

Woah woah woah. First, someone thinks the original sentence is correct (!!!) Next, someone else thinks that I'm so dumb I don't know how to find links on a web page. 

I feel so dumb I was at a lost of words to fight. I succumbed to my dumbness and gave in to them, admitted defeat and swore in my heart never to go back to that war zone ever again. 

There were more actually, but during my quest to print screen more wreckage from my defeated war grounds, the site crashed. Evidence as shown below. 

My theme chio right? XD

  

To ensure that it isn't Firefox's problem, I tried it on Chrome. What I got what the same "Service Temporarily Unavailable" message.

My Chrome theme chio too right?

Yah okay, seen through me, these two print-screens are meant to show off my themes of my web browsers and nothing more. Kill me kill me. 

Well, I went back to T*****a again shortly after and the website is working well. I'm not gonna meddle with it anymore and it'll prolly just make me feel even more like an idiot than before. 

So bye bye and good luck. 

Then again, don't meddle with politics too. GE is around the corner, parliament has dissolved, but I don't want to see friendships dissolved too. 

XOXO.

BTW, if the orange font colour is too bright for your eyes to function then I'm really sorry. Cos' I'm feeling really bimbotic now and wants to paint my world with a colour of my liking. Peace out. May your God's love be with you cos' mine will not be. 

XOsauce, for yummy prawns.