Computers-Translators

Assignment 1

Read the passage and discuss it. Decode the last paragraph in Standard English and translate it.

EuroEnglish

The European Union commissioners have announced that agreement has been reached to adopt English as the preferred language for European communications, rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of negotiations, her majesty Government conceded that English spelling has some room for improvement and has accepted a five-year phased plan for what will be known as EuroEnglish (Euro for short).

In the first year, “s’’ will be used instead of the soft “c”. Sertainly, sivil servants will reseive this news with joy. Also, the hard “c” will be replased with “k”. Not only with this klear up konfusion, but typewriters kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome “ph” will be replased by “f”. This will make words like “fotograf” 20 per sent shorter.

In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be ekspekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters, which have always been a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of silent “e” in the languag is disgrasful, and they would go.

By the forth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing “th” by “z” and “w” by “v”. After zis fifz year, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trobls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer. Ze drem vil finali kum tru.

II. Arrange the following words in pairs according to the similar meaning.

To develop, modern, model, to help, due to, negligible, to interpret, to work out, contamination, present-day, matter, aspect, power, to reach, particularly, insignificant, pattern, by virtue of, pollution, energy, to achieve, to assist, to explain, specifically.

Assignment 2.

Working individually, read the following source text carefully. Then study accompanying machine translation of the text, comparing them with the original. Try to make this machine-translated text usable.

Computers-Translators

Foreign-language translator may prove to be just a bit more than computer can handle. From the Tower of Babel on there have been countless examples of man’s inability to understand man. What hope is there then to understand man, or even another machine? Machine translators would be an enormous boon, especially to science and technology. A machine translator would obviously be a great aid.

In the 80s a machine was developed that can optically scan the written characters and print out the translation. It has a program that translates Chinese into English and English into Chinese. At a press demonstration the programmer asked for a phrase to translate and a reporter said: “Out of sight, out of mind”. The phrase was dutifully fed into the computer, which replied by printing out a string of Chinese characters. “There”, said the programmer, “that means “out of sight, out of mind”. The reporter was skeptical. “I don’t know Chinese and I don’t know that that means out of sight, out of mind”. “Well” replied the engineer, “it is really quite simple. We’ll ask the other program to translate the Chinese into English”. And so once again a string of characters, this time Chinese, was fed into the computer. The translation was typed out almost immediately and it read: “invisible fool”.

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