Activity 1 - Machine Translation

Activity 1 - Machine Translation
Huge advances have been made in the area of machine translation. There are a
number of translation sites available online. For this task, I have chosen Google
translate, but of course other websites are available.
You can also try:
http://www.babelfish.com
http://translate.reference.com
http://translation.babylon.com
When typing “It is raining cats and dogs” into Google translate, the answer provided
is “Es regnet Hunde und Katzen”. There are several observations worth making here:
1. The translation is correct. “It is raining” is “Es regnet” in German. The German
plural forms for Hund, -e and Katze, -n are also correct.
2. Interestingly, the machine switched the order of the animals, and in fact it is more
usual to say “Hunde und Katzen” than “Katzen und Hunde” in idiomatic German.
3. However, this does not convey the true meaning of the English sentence. What
has gone wrong here? It seems that machines translate word for word rather than
the overall meaning. In this case, this would be something like “It is raining heavily”,
and if we feed this expression into the machine we get: “Es stark regnet”, which is a
better translation. However, something has gone awry with the word order, it should
be “Es regnet stark”.
Can you speculate what happens if you type in “It is sheeting down” or “It is pouring
with rain”? Try these for yourself. The problem seems to stem from the use of images
and metaphors in the original. There are no real cats, dogs or sheets involved here,
but the machine isn’t able to render German equivalents of these images.
How about the other way round, though? Try entering a few German expressions
you know well and see whether the English translation matches your own. You can
also paste whole passages. Try out this snippet from the homepage of the city of
Berlin:
http://www.berlin.de
Liebe Leserinnen und Leser, Berlin ist eine tolle Stadt! Und
Berlin wird immer größer: Es wird viel gebaut. Es gibt immer
mehr Arbeitsplätze. Und die Berliner Wirtschaft wächst so stark
wie in keinem anderen Ort in Deutschland.
Was ist das Besondere an Berlin? In diesem Heft finden Sie
dazu einen kleinen Überblick. Ich lade Sie ein, unsere schöne
Stadt zu entdecken!
Herzliche Grüße, Ihr Klaus Wowereit, Regierender
Bürgermeister von Berlin

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