Automated Language Translation Machines

Machine translation has had an eventful history. It first arose in dramatic historical circumstances and in response to an overriding political need. The United States had developed and used the atomic bomb. For the time being, it had a monopoly on this terrible weapon. How long would the monopoly last? When would the Soviet Union catch up? One way of guessing the answer was to combthrough all the research journals being published in the USSR, looking for clues as to the state of knowledge in the relevant discipline. The journals were in Russian. The US needed either to train up a veritable army of Russian-English scientific translators – or to invent a machine that would do the job for them.

But it takes a long time to constitute a large group of translators from a language not widely known. There was no obvious source of English-educated scientifically literate Russian translators in 1945, and so the authorities began to look towards machines.

The Second World War had fostered great advances in cryptography, the making and breaking of secret codes. Statistical techniques had been developing for decoding messages even when the language that had been encoded was not known. The great successes of the code-breakers at the Bletchley Parksite in England prompted some thinkers to wonder whether language itself could not be treated as a code. In a famous memorandum written in July1949, Warren Weaver, senior official with the Rockefeller Foundation, found it

‘ very temping to say that a book written in Chinese is simply a book in English which was coded into the ‘Chinese code’. If we have useful methods for solving almost any cryptographic problem, may it not be that with proper interpretation we already have useful methods for translation?.

So, if language could be treated as a code, then there would be huge development contracts available for mathematicians, logicians and engineers working on new and exciting number-crunching devices that had only just acquired their modern name of computers.

A code is a way of representing a piece of information in a way that is only receivable if the key to the code is available. If a language itself is a code, what does it encode? There’s only one possible answer and that answer is; meaning.

How can a translation be done by machines?

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Exercise 4. Translate the following words and word combinations choosing the

concrete meaning for the concrete world combination.

(конкретизация – выбор нужного значения из всех, указанных в

словаре)

good food …………………………………………….

good water …………………………………………….

good flowers …………………………………………..

good lungs …………………………………………….

good excuse …………………………………………...

good citizen …………………………………………..

bad fish ……………………………………………..

bad smell …………………………………………….

bad headache …………………………………………

a bad finger …………………………………………...

a bad mistake ………………………………………...

a bad coin ………………………………………….

a bad debt ………………………………………….

Exercise 5. В каждой из представленных ниже фраз есть слово или

словосочетание, нуждающееся либо в расширении, либо в сужении

значения. Опираясь на контекст, переведите их, пользуясь приемом

конкретизации или генерализации.

1. His hands were short and broad.

……………………………………………………………………

2. There was a similar campaign about 10 years ago. ………………………………………………………………….

.

3.From her corner she could see every inch of the big room.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

4, It turned my limbs leaden. ……………………………………………………..

…………………………………………………………………………………….

5.Our challenge now is to promote ideas of freedom.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

6.The lady’s hat was an elaborate affair of ribbons and feathers.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

7.Martin’s performance at the exam was, unfortunately, far from perfect.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...

8.It is now perfectly clear to me that my previous pattern of life was

gone forever. ………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

9.All the houses along the seafront promenade had black, blank windows, for this was a summer place, in February it was only half alive. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

10.She had been in perfect health when she stepped off the kerb in Piccadilly and the car had killed her.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Exercise 6. Переведите предложения. пользуясь приемом конкретизации или

генерализации.

1. Mother entered carrying the tea things. ……………………………………….

…………………………………………………………………………………

2. We are going to have a secretary. But we don’t want some flighty young thing sitting behind that desk powdering her nose and making eyes at everybody. …………………………………………………………………...

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………..

3. Things they had learned to ignore in each other resurfaced.

………………………………………………………………………………..

……………………………………………………………………………….

4. She didn’t want to miss a thing. ……………………………………………..

5. What was it? The flu? – “Oh, yes, probably… Some little stomach thing.”

………………………………………………………………………………

6. It won’t cost you a thing. …………………………………………………….

…………………………………………………………………………………

Exercise 7. Не переводя всего предложения, определите каким словом вы перевели бы существительное men, которое требует конкретизации.

1. His only information about me was that I was some sort of Government man, going on a special mission to the Arctic. …………

2. With nothing much to do himself, Lamar now studies the stiffening necks of the younger men in his section … ……………….

3. Before he left, Columbus also told his men to build a fort and moat to impress the Indians …………………………..

4. The news trickled back that General Lee had issued orders that no private property in Pennsylvania should be touched, that looting world be punished by death… Not turn the men loose in the rich storehouses of that prosperous state? ………………………..

5. Scarlett was indignant that he had read her mind. She liked to believe herself a mystery to men, but she knew Rhett thought her as transparent as glass. ……………………………….

6. Nowadays the only news was that which passed from mouth to mouth.

Short of paper, short of ink, short of men, the newspapers suspended publications after the siege began, and the wildest rumors appeared from nowhere and swept through the town. ………………………….

7. The Vikings began their expeditions from the Scandinavian countries about 800 A.D. and went on until about 1000 A.D. While trading, looting and conquering, these tall, blond. Blue-eyed men found their way to the British Isles, the Frankish empire and the Mediterranean, to

the Baltic lands, Russia, Byzantium, Iceland, Greenland and America. …………………………………..

Exercise 8. Read the following sentences paying attention to the words in bold

type.

A. Do the translation. Use a dictionary to find the right meaning to the

words in bold type (“ложные друзья переводчика”)