Tatoeba
Tatoeba is a free, open-source multilingual sentence database of 13.5 million sentences across 429 languages. Run by a volunteer community through a French non-profit association, it serves language learners, translators, developers, and researchers with searchable examples, API access, and downloadable datasets.
- Company typePrivate
- Founded2006
- HeadquartersNot specified, France
- Headcount1–10
- GTM typeB2C
- OfferingSoftware
What Tatoeba does
Tatoeba is a French-registered non-profit association (Association Tatoeba) that operates a collaborative, open-source multilingual sentence database founded in 2006 by Trang Ho. The platform hosts 13,528,187 sentences across 429 languages, with all textual content released under Creative Commons licenses (CC BY 2.0 FR for text, CC0 optionally for contributions), enabling unrestricted reuse by individuals, developers, and researchers. Users can browse, search, add, and translate sentences, listen to audio recordings for select sentences (via the Shtooka partnership), and access community features such as the Wall and member lists.
The underlying technology stack is built on CakePHP with an in-progress migration to Django, uses the Sphinx search engine for high-performance multilingual full-text search (including stemming and non-ASCII support), and leverages MeCab for Japanese tokenization and furigana display. Distribution occurs through the tatoeba.org website, a customizable downloads page offering bulk sentence exports, and a public REST API with OpenAPI documentation and JavaScript examples; the codebase is open-sourced on GitHub. Infrastructure is hosted on a dedicated server provided by the Free Software Foundation France.
Tatoeba's business model is that of a public-good, community-led non-profit: the service is entirely free to users, with no paid tiers or licensing fees. Operating capital comes from voluntary donations (accepted via IBAN and PayPal) and occasional grants, the most notable being a $15,000 Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) award in 2019 to fund mobile UI improvements. GTM is community-led and API-first, with growth driven by organic word-of-mouth, third-party developer integrations (e.g., Benkyou, ChineseBoost, grammarquiz.online), developer events like the Kodoeba coding program, and channels including a blog, GitHub, Transifex for UI translations, and a 129,000+ member Facebook group.
Tatoeba firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- Tatoeba
- Legal name
- ASSOCIATION TATOEBA
- Website
- https://tatoeba.org
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 2006
- Operating status
- Operating
- Headcount range
- 1–10 employees
- Short description
- Tatoeba is a free, open-source multilingual sentence database of 13.5 million sentences across 429 languages. Run by a volunteer community through a French non-profit association, it serves language learners, translators, developers, and researchers with searchable examples, API access, and downloadable datasets.
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
Tatoeba industry classification
Industry- Product category
- Multilingual Sentence Database
- NAICS
- Libraries and Archives (519210), Information (51)
- akta.pro primary industry
- Localization, Translation & Cultural Adaptation for Learning Content (EDAGAKAK)
- akta.pro secondary industries
- Content Localization, Translation & Transcreation (BPAFAIAH), Multilingual/Translation Communication Apps (BPAMACAJ)
Keywords
Where Tatoeba is headquartered
LocationHeadquarters
- HQ city
- Not specified
- HQ country
- France
- HQ region
- Europe
Offices2 records
Markets served
Tatoeba business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2C
- Offering type
- Software
- Cost components
- Technology or R&D, Infrastructure, Personnel, Operations
Revenue model
- Donations: Tatoeba operates as a non-profit association receiving voluntary donations from supporters. Donations are accepted via IBAN transfer (EU countries) and PayPal. Recurring monthly donors and one-time contributions are listed publicly.
- Grants: Tatoeba has received grant funding from organizations like Mozilla Open Source Support ($15,000 in 2019) to support specific development initiatives such as mobile UI improvements.
Pricing tiers
| Model | Billing | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Freemium | Others | Free access to all features |
Go-to-market motion2 records
Distribution channels4 records
Marketing channels7 records
Tatoeba product offering
Product offeringCore offering
Tatoeba is a free, collaborative, open-source online database of sentences and their translations in multiple languages, built and maintained by a community of contributors. It provides example sentences, parallel translations, audio pronunciations, vocabulary lists, and sentence-level metadata, and exposes this content via a public website, a developer API, and bulk downloadable files for offline use.
Product overview
Tatoeba is a single unified product—a collaborative, open-source multilingual sentence database. The core offering is a web platform where users browse, search, add, and translate sentences across 429 languages with over 13.5 million sentences. The product ecosystem includes data downloads for developers, a public API for programmatic access, community discussion features (Wall), audio recording partnerships, and a separate developer testing environment. All content is released under Creative Commons licenses (primarily CC BY 2.0 FR with some CC0).
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Products and services
- Tatoeba Sentence and Translation Platform
Companies that use Tatoeba
Customer profileNamed customers6 records
Segments4 records
Ideal customer profiles2 records
Tatoeba technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed Yes
API detail
- Has API
- Yes
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
Integration1 record
AI capability3 records
Feature3 records
Tatoeba partnerships and signals
Strategic signalPartnerships
Two partnerships are on record, tiered core.
- Free Software Foundation FrancecoreFree Software Foundation France provided hosting for Tatoeba's server infrastructure. This partnership enabled Tatoeba to move from third-party hosting to its own dedicated server, significantly improving performance and operational independence. The server is provided as part of FSF France's support for free software projects.
- ShtookacorePartnership with Shtooka, a non-profit organization based in Paris, to integrate audio recordings for Tatoeba sentences. Shtooka provides collections of audio for words, expressions, proverbs, and sentences. The collaboration began in April 2010 to add audio functionality, with initial focus on Shanghainese sentences recorded in Paris.
Scale indicators6 records
Recent moves7 records
Expansion highlights6 records
Tatoeba competitors and assessment
Company assessmentDirect peers
- Reverso: Reverso offers translation examples, conjugation tools, and language learning features built on a multilingual corpus. It competes for the same language-learner and translator use cases as Tatoeba, but as a commercial product with both free and paid tiers.
- OPUS: OPUS is an open-source collection of parallel corpora widely used in NLP and machine translation research. It overlaps with Tatoeba as a freely available multilingual parallel corpus for researchers and developers, though OPUS aggregates crawled and aligned data rather than community-contributed sentences.
- Glosbe: Glosbe is a multilingual dictionary and translation memory that crowdsources sentences and translations across many languages. Like Tatoeba, it offers example sentences in context and is used by language learners and developers, but it operates as a for-profit company with commercial ambitions.
- Linguee: Linguee (now part of DeepL) provides example sentences and translations drawn from bilingual web corpora. It is a direct comparator as a multilingual example-sentence resource used primarily by translators and language learners, though it is commercial and proprietary rather than community-driven.
- Wiktionary: Wiktionary is a free, multilingual, collaboratively-edited dictionary hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is comparable as a community-driven open-licensed multilingual reference resource, though it focuses on word definitions rather than translation sentence pairs.
Emerging players
- Forvo: Forvo is the largest pronunciation dictionary, with crowdsourced audio recordings across hundreds of languages. It is comparable to Tatoeba as a community-contributed multilingual reference resource and complements Tatoeba's Shtooka audio integration.
- Common Crawl: Common Crawl provides open web crawl data, including multilingual parallel text, used heavily in NLP training. It overlaps with Tatoeba as a freely available multilingual data source for researchers, but is much larger-scale and less curated for language learning.
- Apertium: Apertium is an open-source machine translation platform with rule-based translation between many language pairs. It is comparable to Tatoeba as a free, community-supported multilingual language technology project, with overlap in serving low-resource and minority languages.
Broad incumbents
- Memrise: Memrise is a commercial language learning platform that uses crowdsourced example sentences and audio to teach vocabulary. It targets the same learner segment as Tatoeba and overlaps on user-contributed content, but as a venture-backed product with paid tiers.
- Duolingo: Duolingo is the dominant commercial language learning platform with its own proprietary sentence/example corpus. It is comparable as a destination for the same language-learner persona Tatoeba serves, but operates at vastly larger scale with a paid subscription model.
Market position
Strengths4 records
Weaknesses4 records
Competitive moat5 records
Key risks5 records
Key highlights6 records
Customer concentration
Tatoeba social profiles
Digital presenceTatoeba compliance and trust
Trust signalCompliance2 records
Tatoeba financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
Tatoeba leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Profiles2 records
Tatoeba funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds
Investors
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Tatoeba M&A and investment
M&A and investmentM&A
Investments
M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Frequently asked questions about Tatoeba
What does Tatoeba do?
Tatoeba is a free, collaborative, open-source online database of sentences and their translations in multiple languages, built and maintained by a community of contributors. It provides example sentences, parallel translations, audio pronunciations, vocabulary lists, and sentence-level metadata, and exposes this content via a public website, a developer API, and bulk downloadable files for offline use.
Is Tatoeba a public or private company?
Tatoeba is a private company. It is classified as nonprofit foundation owned and is currently operating.
When was Tatoeba founded?
Tatoeba was founded in 2006. It employs 1 to 10 people.
Where is Tatoeba based?
Tatoeba is headquartered in Not specified, France, in the Europe region.
How does Tatoeba make money?
Two revenue lines are on record. Donations are the primary driver. The others are grants.
Who are Tatoeba's main competitors?
Direct peers on record are Reverso, OPUS, Glosbe, Linguee and Wiktionary. Emerging players are Forvo, Common Crawl and Apertium. Broad incumbents are Memrise and Duolingo.
Does Tatoeba have an API?
Yes. Tatoeba provides a public REST API that allows developers to search for sentences by keywords and download sentences as text. The API is available at api.tatoeba.org with documentation at api.dev.tatoeba.org/openapi. JavaScript examples are provided for common use cases such as searching sentences and downloading text. Developer documentation is at api.dev.tatoeba.org/openapi.
What industry is Tatoeba in?
Tatoeba's product category is Multilingual Sentence Database. Its primary akta.pro industry code is EDAGAKAK, Localization, Translation & Cultural Adaptation for Learning Content, with a secondary code of BPAFAIAH, Content Localization, Translation & Transcreation. Its NAICS code is 519210.