Text II

Word-study

Exercise 1. Check the transcription in the dictionary and read the words listed below.

Nouns:

uselessness, myth, howler, target, fraught.

Verbs:

to separate, to rearrange, to suffice, to click.

Adjectives:

famous, separate, reliable, rough, source, automated, idiomatic.

Exercise 2. Match the antonyms.

Verbs:

1) suffice	a) fail
2) separate	b) produce
3) succeed	c) not to be enough
4) input	d) spend
	e) unite
	f) manage
	g) output

Adjectives:

1) reliable	a) strong
2) weak	b) exact
3) complicated	c) valuable
4) rough	d) insecure
5) modern	e) simple
	f) out of date
	g) attractive
	h) interactive

Scan-reading

TRANSLATING MACHINES

Jokes about the uselessness of machine translation abound. The Control Intelligence Agency was said to have spent millions trying to program computers to translate Russian into English. The best it managed to do was to turn the famous Russian saying «The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak» into «The vodka is good but the meat is rotten». This story is a myth. But machine translation certainly produced its share of howlers and was too much relied upon.

It was Japanese researchers who moved by the linguistic barrier that seemed sometimes to separate their country's scientists and technicians from the rest of the world made energetic steps toward a reliable machine translation. Their efforts were imitated in the West.

The earliest «translation engines» were based on a direct, so called «Transformer» approach. Input sentences of the source language were transformed directly into output sentences of the target language. At first the machine did a rough analysis of the source sentence dividing it into subject–object–verb, etc. Then source words were replaced by target words selected from a dictionary and their order was rearranged according to the rules of the target language.

These rough operations with earlier machines resulted in a simplified transformation fraught with these silly sentences so much laughed at now. Then came modern computers, which had more processing power and more memory. Their translation engines are able to adopt less direct approach, using what is called «linguistic knowledge». It is this that allowed to produce e-j bank and to succeed with «Tsunami» and «Typhoon» – the first Japanese language – translation software to run on the standard (English) version of Microsoft Windows. Linguistic knowledge translators have two sets of grammatical rules – one for the source language and one for the target language. They also have a lot of information about the idiomatic differences between the languages to stop them making silly mistakes.

Having been designed from the start for use on a personal computer rather than a powerful workstation or even a mainframe, «Tsunami» (English to Japanese) and «Typhoon» (Japanese to English) use memory extremely efficiently. As a result, they are fast on the latest PCs – translating at speed more than 30.000 words an hour. Do they produce perfect translations at the click of a mouse? Not at all. The machine translation comes at first to the hands of expert translators to get their teeth into. One mistake that the earlier researchers made was to imagine that only fully automated machine translation would suffice.

Notes:

e-j bank – Англо-Японский банк слов;

howlers – грубейшие ошибки;

polish up – улучшать;

source language – исходный язык;

target language – выходной язык;

to get teeth into – тщательно (внимательно) изучать;

workstation – рабочее место со всем компьютерным оборудованием.

Comprehension check

Exercise 1. Say what you have learned about:

a) the direct «transformer» approach in machine translation;

b) the «linguistic knowledge» method in machine translation.

Exercise 2. Answer the questions.

1. What did machine translation lack since its earliest days?

2. Why have the Japanese researchers made energetic steps towards a reliable machine translation?

Exercise 3. Comment on the following statements.

1. The only purpose of machine translation is to produce a perfect translation at the click of a mouse.

2. Machine translation is to provide expert translators with good first drafts to polish up.

Language activity

Exercise 1. Translate the sentences into Russian. Point out the Subjective Infinitive Constructions.

1. The first thousand of the Net enthusiasts proved to be mainly academic and computer professionals.

2. Even the more sophisticated computational systems are unlikely to substitute the human brain.

3. CERN and MIT are known to be the first to turn towards Web development.

4. The Microsoft Corporation is considered to have become the world's biggest PC software provider.

5. The invention of microchips and new operating systems was expected to enable smaller and cheaper computers to perform difficult tasks faster.

6. The Web is stated to have created a standard that everybody could – and did – follow.

7. The boys enjoy, while looking NASA space flight transmission, to be informed what the astronauts are doing.

Exercise 2. Translate the sentences into Russian. Point out the Objective Infinitive Constructions.

1. Lady Byron considered computers to be basically stupid although they could seem clever.

2. We know the first computers to have represented a mass of vacuum tubes, transistors and integrated circuits.

3. Teachers expect the Centre of Education to provide them with information on programs for keeping students competitive in science and technology.

4. Businesspeople would like selling to be done anywhere via Web and other Internet resources.

5. We believe Hollerith to be the second giant after Babbage due to his «tabulating machine» to have completed the results of the 1890 US Census.

6. People involved in business know several cases of on-line fraud and computer-based espionage to have been committed.

7. Engineers know the speed of light to be the limiting speed on computers.

8. Do you know the Queen of Great Britain to become the first Head of State to use the global computer network.