Two Easy Ways to Help

Now, it is possible to donate your translations. With a single touch/click on the field below the text input, you give us your permission to collect, store, and analyse your translation. As long as the field is checked, your translations will be donated – and you don’t need to do anything.

You can also rate translations and add comments. To use this feature, you need to register for a user account. Once logged in, you’ll find the Feedback Mode available. After selecting an entry from your translation history, a window will open. Here, you can rate the translation (good, poor, unusual) and leave a comment or correction. This feature is particularly useful for fluent Fering speakers aged 16 and above.

You’ve got questions?

Great! Let’s begin from the start: why are we doing this?

We developed the Auersaater with a strong focus on privacy. The content of translation requests to our server is not analysed by us. But, with our Auersaater project, we also want to research how well machine translation works for Fering and how the translations are perceived. Thus, we want to offer a voluntary way for users to easily submit the contents of their translations. Besides analysing the Auersaaters’ functionality, we’re also generating new language data to further optimise the translation tool. At least, it’s one of our propositions to try and analyse this.

What personal data is stored in this process?

As a general rule, if you provide personal information (a name, for example) in your translation, it will be stored in a data donation or in feedback provided. When we analyse the data, we make every effort to pseudonymise this information. However, data such as IP addresses or usernames are not stored with the donations/feedbacks.

In the case of Data Donation, only the translation content (your input and the translation from the Auersaater) and some technical information (combination of languages, character length of the input, date of the request, processing duration of the server) are stored.

In the Feedback Mode, you also have the option of voluntarily providing additional information about your language biography to your profile. This data helps us to better process the feedback material for sociolinguistic research purposes. However, it will only be linked to your feedback if an individual piece of information cannot be clearly linked to you. This allows us to collect socio-demographic data and ensure pseudonymisation at the same time. You can also change your details at any time on your profile page.

Example of pseudonymization in the Feedback Mode

You want to provide feedback on a translation. You have entered in your feedback profile that you attended Frisian lessons at secondary school. When you submit feedback, it will be saved as coming from a person who attended Frisian lessons at secondary school. But only if there is at least one other feedback profile in which this information is also stored. Otherwise, the information will not be saved.

You can always see what is actually stored with your feedback before submitting. Due to the way we process the linking of information, the linked information can change over time, depending on information provided by other users.

Is it possible to withdraw my data donations and feedbacks?

Data donations and feedback themselves cannot be withdrawn because they are not assigned to a person or user profile and because this would prevent meaningful research work being carried out with the data.

But you’re able at any time to pause the Data Donation (by unchecking the box) or to change or even delete your feedback profile.

Why do I have to be 16 years old to use the Feedback Mode?

As we offer to collect additional personal socio-demographic data for our research when registering for feedback mode, this function is only available to users who are at least 16 years old. This is due to legal requirements regarding data protection.

At a glance: what data is transmitted with a Data Donation or a feedback?

Data	Donation	Feedback
content of your translation	yes	yes
technical information on the translation process	yes	yes
feedback	no	yes
IP-address, user name, mail address	no	no
age group	no	*
since when you’re speaking Frisian	no	*
info on Frisian lessons/courses	no	*
frequency of language use	no	*

* = this information is completely voluntary and the information is only collected if you wish to provide it yourself and there is at least 1 other person who also provides this information.

All data collected will only be used for research purposes and will not be linked to other data sets from this website.

All information on this is also explained in our privacy policy.

Terms of use

The use of the Data Donation and the Feedback Mode functions is completely voluntary and only takes place with the user’s consent. With these functions, the translation request sent to our site is saved with the server’s response and additional data, as previously explained on this page (see above) and as outlined in our privacy policy. With the consent to data collection, the data will be made available to the Ferring Stiftung irrevocably and free of charge for research purposes. The Ferring Stiftung reserves the right to make pseudonymized research data available to other researchers.