Questão 3429

(Cesgranrio - 1994)

THE LANGUAGE BARRIER

            Early last year, at a trade fair in Milan, a revolutionary telephone system was ¹unveiled. Developed by American and Japanese, the new machine provides instantaneous translation of the caller's speech. Say "hello" in English and it will come out as "alô" in Portuguese or the equivalent word in the language of your choice. It's remarkable! It might make you think that the whole business of language learning could soon become redundant. But ²don't be hasty.

            ³A sophisticated computer was programmed to perform language translation. ⁴It was instructed to translate "out of sight, out of mind" into Russian. ⁵The Russian translation was ⁶then fed into the computer and translated back into English. The result was: "invisible lunatic". A typical error. Natural language is so complex and ambiguous ⁷that a ⁸computer will invariably have difficulty in making sense of it. The new phone can deal with "hello" and other words well enough. But if asked to translate a sentence, its limitations soon become apparent.

            The dream of "machine translation" (MT) is almost as old as the modern digital computer itself: the idea was promoted in 1949 and by the late 50's more than 20 MT projects were in development. By 1966 the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee concluded that "there's no immediate or predictable prospect of useful machine translation." Research funds were cut. In the late 70's MT was re-discovered.

            ⁹The new generation of programs is less ambitious. ¹⁰They are limited to texts where the possibilities of error are minimal, such as technical reports and operating manuals. ¹¹Furthermore, the computers simply produce ¹²a workable draft translation, which a human "post-editor" will then correct.

            ¹³In spite of their obvious limitations, MTs are extremely fast and reasonably accurate. ¹⁴Yet, even the most optimistic scientists admit that it'll be at least 20 years before computers are capable of translating more sophisticated texts.

(Adapted from Speak Up - January 91.)

The new telephone system described in the text translates words and phrases from English into other languages. Mark the item which contains a suitable English equivalent for the following Portuguese phrases that may be part of a telephone conversation:

I - "Como vai você?"

II - "Quem está falando?

III - "Ele não está. Quer deixar recado?"