In Google's vision of the future, people will be able to translate documents instantly into the world's
main languages with machine logic, not expert linguists, leading the way.
Google's approach, called statistical(统计的) machine translation, differs from past efforts in which it
does without language experts who program grammatical rules and dictionaries into computers. Instead,
they feed documents humans have already translated into two languages and then rely on computers to
decide patterns for future translations.
Though the quality is not perfect, it is an improvement on previous efforts at machine translation, said
Franz Och, 35, a German who heads Google's translation effort at its Mountain View headquarters south
of San Francisco. "Some people who have been in machine translations for a long time see our
Arabic-English output, and then they say, that's amazing; that's a breakthrough(突破)." Said Och. "And
then other people who have never seen what machine translation was read through the sentence and they
say, the first mistake here in Line Five－it doesn't seem to work because there is a mistake there."
But for some tasks, a mostly correct translation may be good enough. Speaking over lunch this week
in a Google cafeteria famed for offering free, healthy food, Och showed a translation of an Arabic Web
news site into easily digestible English.
Two Google workers speaking Russian at a nearby table said, however, that a translation of a news
site from English into their native tongue was understandable but a bit awkward. Och, who speaks
German, English and some Italian, feeds hundreds of millions of words from parallel texts such as Arabic
and English into the computer, using United Nations and European Union documents as key sources.
Languages without considerable translated texts, such as some African languages, face greater
obstacles. "The more data we feed into the system, the better it gets." said Och, who moved to the
United States from Germany in 2002.
The program applies statistical analysis, an approach he hopes will avoid diplomatic embarrassing
mistakes in diplomatic situations, such as when Russian leader Putin's translator annoyed then German
Chancellor( * * ) Gerhard Schroeder by calling him the German "Fuhrer ("leader" in English)," which is
forbidden in that context because of its association with Adolf Hitler.
"I would hope that the language model would say, well, Schroeder is…very rare but Bundeskanzler
Gerhard Schroeder is probably 100 times more frequent than Fuhrer
and then it would make the right decision." Och said.
1. In what way is "Google's machine translation" different from previous ones?
A. Linguists guide the computer translation on Google.
B. International official papers are programmed as its major sources.
C. Rules and dictionaries are fed into computers to support it.
D. Google daily updates the program of this computer translation.
2. We can learn from the passage that users ___________.
A. think highly of Google's new approach
B. criticize it for its broken translation
C. hope Google can perfect it before launching
D. hold different opinions towards Google's new approach
3. Why are there more troubles in translations relating to African languages?
A. Most of the translated materials are not properly translated.
B. The computer programmers know little of African languages.
C. It's hard to find enough African translation documents.
D. The UN and EU failed to provide translated African documents.
4. Statistical analysis in this passage is conducted by ________.
A. hiring people who speak different languages
B. counting how frequently a word is used in the language
C. using the computer with its own grammatical rules
D. reminding users of the likely embarrassing mistakes
