Page 48 - Міністерство освіти і науки України

2. Think of the “analysis” and “synthesis” as two contrasting ways of
investigation. Write out the dictionary entries for these words.
Stage II
1. Speak on the machine translation, its progress, present-day potentialities and
spheres of employment.
2. Express your own idea (rationale or intuitive) of the ability of computer to surpass
human capabilities in translating in future.
3. Be ready to discuss the following topics:
– ambiguity problem in translation;
– basic machine translation methods;
– computer-aided translation.

Stage III
Translate the text with the help of computer. Find grammatical and stylistical
mistakes. Correct the translation.
Computer-Translators
Foreign-language translation 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, 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 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 sceptical. “I don’t know Chinese and I don’t know that that
means ‘out of sight, out of mind’.”
“Well,” replied the engineer, “it’s 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
idiot”.

Assignment 3
Lexicological aspects of translation

Stage I
1. Find English equivalents for the following phrases:
системно організований
зумовлюватись позамовними факторами

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