Translating machines

There are many jokes about the uselessness of machine translation. The Control Intelligence Agency was said to have spent millions trying to program computers for translating from Russian into English. The best result was translation of the famous Russian proverb “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.

Japanese researchers 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 were resulted in a simplified transformation with lots of 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 use “linguistic knowledge”. It allowed to produce English-Japanese bank and 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 “Tsunami”and “Typhoon” use memory extremely efficiently. Their translating speed is more than 30.000 words per hour.

Do they produce perfect translations at a 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 had made was to imagine that fully automated machine translation was possible.

Notes:

*source language - язык оригинала

**target language - язык перевода

***to get teeth into - тщательно изучать

Ex. 2. Make up a short summary of the text.

TEXT 4

Read the text, translate it and answer the question of the title.

What is steganography?

While we are discussing it in terms of computer security, Steganography is really nothing new, as it has been around since the times of ancient Rome. For example, in ancient Rome and Greece, text was traditionally written on wax that was poured on top of stone tablets. If the sender of the information wanted to obscure the message - for purposes of military intelligence, for instance - they would use Steganography: the wax would be scraped off and the message would be inscribed or written directly on the tablet, wax would then be poured on top of the message, thereby obscuring not just its meaning but its very existence.

According to Longman Contemporary English Dictionary Steganography (also known as “steg” or “stego”) is “the art of writing in cipher or in characters, which are not intelligible except to persons who have the key; cryptography” computer terms, Steganography has evolved into the practice of hiding a message within a larger one in such a way that others cannot discern the presence or contents of the hidden message. In contemporary terms, Steganography has evolved into a digital strategy of hiding a file in some form of multimedia, such as an image, an audio file or even a video file.

Unit 12

WORD-STUDY