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Blog, English School Articles · October 29, 2008

translation?!

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With the power of the internet at our fingertips it’s becoming more common for people to rely on it for knowledge. Yet, despite this, language translation services still can’t replace good old-fashioned hard work. At present a few students are working their way through “Animal Farm” which, while relatively short, is quite challenging and loaded with lots of difficult vocabulary. I heard from one student’s son that his mother was finding it rather difficult to understand so she turned to the internet for help. She retyped the paragraph she was having trouble understanding and then hit the button. To her surprise she found the translation harder to understand than the English itself!!!!

People are always looking for an easier way to get work done and computers have helped us dramatically in increasing what we can accomplish. They are great at translating individual words and allow us to tap into the most powerful tool the world has ever known – the internet. But the one thing computers cannot yet do is “think.” Unlike people that can extrapolate knowledge from information that they are presented with. computers rely on programs to achieve their goals. Knowing both the computers strengths and weaknesses allows us to harness the great power it possesses. But as my student learned; sometimes it’s just easier to do the work than trying to find a shortcut.

Adrian

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Mark Smith

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  1. Al Bartle says

    October 30, 2008 at 5:56 pm

    What you are saying is so true! The TANSTAFL principle still applies. “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch!” and nothing beats real honest-to-goodness hard work. I often use Altavista (Yahoo?) Babelfish Internet translator for a few words at a time. It works fairly well for that. But paste in a paragraph and what you get is sometimes more funny than anything on Comedy Central. But as you say, as long as you understand the limits of this tool, it still can be useful when you’re in a hurry. Just don’t accept what you get as a “good” and don’t cut and paste it “as is” into your document if you don’t want to be laughed at! Language with its subtle nuances is far too complex for a current day computer and its program to decipher but maybe in about 10 years? Who knows?

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