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Off topic: 泰晤士(TIMES)四合院儿
Thread poster: QHE
ysun
ysun  Identity Verified
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English to Chinese
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The right to know Aug 23, 2015

First of all, the people should be told what had really happened. Meanwhile, the people should be told what proper measures they should take to deal with the hazards and dangers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_know
"Right to know", in the context of United States workplace and community environmental law, is the legal principle that the individual has the right to know the chemicals to which they may be exposed in their daily living.
...
Cyanide is one of the most toxic substances known to man. Failure to obtain proper disclosure is likely to lead to improper or ineffective medical diagnosis and treatment. This can contribute to prolonged illness and death.

最最起码,“专家”如果还有点良心和道德,就不该如此忽悠老百姓:
http://tech.sina.com.cn/d/v/2015-08-17/doc-ifxfxray5595204.shtml
氰化钠是弱酸盐,非常容易水解,在低温下就能与水反应掉。它也不可能形成毒雨,它在环境中很容易自然降解,还没等雨下下来,就基本上被氧化了。

人们不禁要问,氰化钠与水反应(水解),不就成了毒性更大的氰化氢?如果真像“专家”所说,氰化钠在环境中很容易自然降解、很容易氧化,那还要双氧水干什么?


 
wherestip
wherestip  Identity Verified
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Automatability of Some Common Jobs Aug 23, 2015

One man's opinion ...

http://money.cnn.com/video/technology/2015/08/22/gps-common-jobs-tech.cnnmoney


 
QHE
QHE
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TOPIC STARTER
Self Service Aug 23, 2015



Supermarket Self Service Checkout




 
wherestip
wherestip  Identity Verified
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Local time: 23:37
Chinese to English
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MT Aug 23, 2015


          



[Edited at 2015-08-24 00:15 GMT]


 
QHE
QHE
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TOPIC STARTER
701 Translator Aug 25, 2015

… the first public demonstration of machine translation: the Georgetown-IBM system

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/701/701_translator.html



IBM Press release, January 8, 1954

New York, January 7..... Russian was translated into English by an electronic "brain" today for the first time.

Brief statements about politics, law, mathematics, chemistry, metallurgy, communications and military affairs were submitted in Russian by linguists of the Georgetown University Institute of Languages and Linguistics to the famous 701 computer of the International Business Machines Corporation. And the giant computer, within a few seconds, turned the sentences into easily readable English...




The IBM 701 used electrostatic storage, consisting of 72 Williams tubes with a capacity of 1024 bits each. The total memory was 2048 words of 36 bits each.






[Edited at 2015-08-25 02:25 GMT]


[Edited at 2015-08-25 17:30 GMT]


 
wherestip
wherestip  Identity Verified
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Local time: 23:37
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Machine Translation Aug 25, 2015

QHE,

Thanks for the info. It's interesting to see the thinking of and approach used by the early pioneers of machine translation.

The following is from the link you provided. They basically used rule-tags, not entirely unlike the IBM Watson machine (further down the road) that had beaten out Ken Jennings et al. on "Jeopardy!"


...

The same probabilities of accurate prediction occur in other fields of technical writing, such as medicine and engineering. Consequently, Doctor Dostert assumes that electronic translation will begin with separate dictionaries for each technical area, and that as experience with them grows, enough will be learned to permit accurate translation of our common everyday language, in which are such illogical and unpredictable words as "charleyhorse."
"Charley" is a nickname for Charles. "Horse" is a type of quadruped. But "charleyhorse" does not mean a horse named Charley. It means a muscular contraction which may take place in the calf. And "calf" in this context does not mean the offspring of a cow.
What the electronic translators have actually done is to create an entirely new electronic language. They have taken normal words and attached to them tags or signs which give each word a precision it does not usually possess. These signs actually denote rules of grammar and meaning. Although only six rules were used in today's demonstration, the six were enough to cover all the words in all the sentences the 701 was asked to translate.
The IBM "brain" could translate only because these rule-tags were hitched onto normal words. For the "brain" cannot think independently. It can only perform tasks in obedience to detailed instructions prepared by human minds. And the minds of the Georgetown linguists (Dr. Dostert was assisted by Dr. Paul Garvin, a member of his Institute staff, just as the enormous detail work at IBM was done by Mathematician Peter Sheridan, under the supervision of Dr. Cuthbert Hurd, Director of IBM's Applied Science Division) could not give the "brain" dependable instructions until they themselves had worked out foolproof means of telling in advance how to translate a word which had more then one meaning.
The six rule-tags were the solution. Those particular six were chosen because they have a broader effect on language translation than any other rules studied by the Georgetown linguists. Doctor Dostert estimates that it may take as many as one hundred rule-tags to translate scientific and technical literature in general. But no matter how large the number becomes the six will remain basic.
...




http://www.techrepublic.com/article/ibm-watson-the-inside-story-of-how-the-jeopardy-winning-supercomputer-was-born-and-what-it-wants-to-do-next/

http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/machine-translation.html


 
wherestip
wherestip  Identity Verified
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Local time: 23:37
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The Challenge Aug 25, 2015

IMO, for machine translation to be on a par with humans, there's still quite a long way to go.

See more
IMO, for machine translation to be on a par with humans, there's still quite a long way to go.

https://books.google.com/books?id=SaPap8lllKIC&pg=PA1&dq="What%20are%20the%20limits%20of%20machine%20translation?%20%20Within%20the%20field%20of%20translation,%20attitudes%20concerning%20this%20question%20have%20changed%20significantly%20since%20the%20early%201980s."&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMI44yroZrExwIVxaA-Ch3cTAhJ#v=onepage&q="What%20are%20the%20limits%20of%20machine%20translation?%20%20Within%20the%20field%20of%20translation,%20attitudes%20concerning%20this%20question%20have%20changed%20significantly%20since%20the%20early%201980s."&f=false



The Possibility of Language

A discussion of the nature of language, with implications for human and machine translation

Alan K. Melby and Terry Warner

1    Limits in Search of a Cause


1.1 An Answer

What are the limits of machine translation? Within the field of translation, attitudes concerning this question have changed significantly since the early 1980s. Answers used to be extreme and contradictory. Some would claim that there were no limits except the speed and memory capacity of computers and that most human translators would soon be replaced by computers. Others would claim that machine translation is necessarily so limited as to be useless and that all development efforts should be abandoned. Thus these incompatible stances characterized machine translation as either nearly trivial or outright impossible. Gradually, more people have taken a more moderate and pragmatic position, acknowledging that machine translation certainly has limits but that within those limits it can be very useful. High-quality machine translation is currently feasible only when the text to be translated is highly restricted. It must be restricted to the vocabulary of some narrow domain of knowledge, such as a particular brand of photocopiers, and it must be straightforward in style and grammar. This type of text is often called a controlled-language text.

Thus we have an answer to the question about the limits of machine translation. The answer is that fully automatic high-quality machine translation requiring little or no revision is feasible only for highly controlled language. But do we have a cause? It is obvious that computers can be more easily programmed to process controlled-language texts than general-language texts. There is less ambiguity and more regularity. What is not obvious is why computers do so poorly on general language texts. A human translator can adapt to various types of text. A computer may do well on a controlled-language text. Why do computers behave so differently on different types of texts? Why can't we generalize and extend the approaches that work on controlled-language texts? Why can't computers be more like humans? Perhaps the way computers process language creates artificial limits which do not apply to human translators. It is generally agreed that speed and memory capacity are no longer the cause of limits and that the limits are not likely to be lifted in the near future. We have an answer to the question of what are the limits of machine translation, but the answer is still in search of a cause. There has been insufficient effort expended in understanding the cause, or basis, of the failure of machine translation to approach the range of performance of human translators.




[Edited at 2015-08-25 13:41 GMT]
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wherestip
wherestip  Identity Verified
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Local time: 23:37
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Sounds like an interesting read ... Aug 25, 2015

http://www.amazon.com/Possibility-Language-implications-translation-Translation/dp/1556196954/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8

           

This book is about the limits of machine translation. It is widely recognized that machine translation systems do much better on domain-specific controlled-language texts (domain texts for short) than on dynamic general-language texts (general texts for short). The authors explore this general ― domain distinction and come to some uncommon conclusions about the nature of language. Domain language is claimed to be made possible by general language, while general language is claimed to be made possible by the ethical dimensions of relationships. Domain language is unharmed by the constraints of objectivism, while general language is suffocated by those constraints. Along the way to these conclusions, visits are made to Descartes and Saussure, to Chomsky and Lakoff, to Wittgenstein and Levinas. From these conclusions, consequences are drawn for machine translation and translator tools, for linguistic theory and translation theory. The title of the book does not question whether language is possible; it asks, with wonder and awe, why communication through language is possible.





~*~*~*~*~*


I still get a kick out of plugging this simple English sentence into Google Translate:

          English : Would somebody please get that door?
          Chinese Translation: 会有人请让那扇门?

There's absolutely no progress made that I can see of as far as a simple sentence like the above is concerned.
And it's not any better in the reverse direction:

          Chinese: 你别在这儿讨人嫌了!
          English Translation: You do not here unpleasant it!




[Edited at 2015-08-25 17:48 GMT]


 
QHE
QHE
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Local time: 00:37
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TOPIC STARTER
“An Art or a Math Problem?” Aug 26, 2015


"The whisky was invisible", or Persistent myths of MT
- By JOHN HUTCHINS
http://www.hutchinsweb.me.uk/MTNI-11-1995.pdf


Scarcely a month goes by without somebody repeating the story of the MT system
which translated the Biblical saying "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" into Russian,
which was then translated back as "The whisky is strong, but the meat is rotten". ...






Is Translation an Art or a Math Problem?
- By GIDEON LEWIS-KRAUS
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/is-translation-an-art-or-a-math-problem.html


Warren Weaver, a founder of the discipline, conceded: “No reasonable person thinks that a machine
translation can ever achieve elegance and style. Pushkin need not shudder.” The whole enterprise
introduces itself in such tones of lab-coat modesty. The less modest assumption behind the aim, though,
is that it’s possible to separate the informational content of a sentence from its style. …

… …

The problem is that all texts have some purpose in mind, and what a good human translator does
is pay attention to how the means serve the end — how the “style” exists in relationship to “the gist.”…





*** *** *** ***


wherestip wrote:
I still get a kick out of plugging this simple English sentence into Google Translate:

          English : Would somebody please get that door?
          Chinese Translation: 会有人请让那扇门?

There's absolutely no progress made that I can see of as far as a simple sentence like the above is concerned.
And it's not any better in the reverse direction:

          Chinese: 你别在这儿讨人嫌了!
          English Translation: You do not here unpleasant it!




Let me try again...

English: small strokes in brain
Chinese Translation: 大脑中的小招

English: treatment for mini strokes
Chinese Translation: 治疗中风迷你

English: treatment for strokes in the brain
Chinese Translation: 治疗大脑中的笔划




[Edited at 2015-08-26 02:56 GMT]

 
wherestip
wherestip  Identity Verified
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Math Problem Aug 26, 2015

QHE wrote:

“An Art or a Math Problem?”



QHE,

For the basic stuff we're talking about (in our examples), it looks to me like a math problem that hasn't been solved.

Just for grins, I plugged in a few more English and Chinese sentences, and came out with similar poor results. And these were neither obscure nor artificial sentences made up to stump the machine, just some random everyday sentences off the top of my head.


[Edited at 2015-08-27 00:04 GMT]


 
David Lin
David Lin  Identity Verified
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Local time: 04:37
Member (2013)
English to Chinese
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Moderator of this forum
2015 国 际 翻 译 日 Aug 26, 2015

为庆祝国际翻译日, ProZ.com 将会于本周末一连两天 (29-30/8) 举行免费网上培训课程。

有兴趣参加的同仁,请参看下面链结,并预留时间网上参与。

http://www.proz.com/virtual-conferences/668

到时见!


 
QHE
QHE
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TOPIC STARTER
National days for everything Aug 26, 2015

August 26
o National Dog Day
o National Women’s Equality Day
o National Cherry Popsicle Day

August 27
o National Pots De Creme Day
o National Just Because Day

August 28
o National Cherry Turnovers Day
o National College Colors Day – First Friday of College School Year?

August 29
o National Chop Suey Day

August 30
o National Toasted Marshmallow Day

August 31
o National
... See more
August 26
o National Dog Day
o National Women’s Equality Day
o National Cherry Popsicle Day

August 27
o National Pots De Creme Day
o National Just Because Day

August 28
o National Cherry Turnovers Day
o National College Colors Day – First Friday of College School Year?

August 29
o National Chop Suey Day

August 30
o National Toasted Marshmallow Day

August 31
o National Trail Mix Day

September 1
 National No Rhyme (Nor Reason) Day

...

http://nationaldaycalendar.com/calendar-at-a-glance/



[Edited at 2015-08-26 23:56 GMT]
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wherestip
wherestip  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 23:37
Chinese to English
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That's just precious :D Aug 27, 2015

QHE wrote:

National days for everything

http://nationaldaycalendar.com/calendar-at-a-glance/




                 

http://nationaldaycalendar.com/days-2/national-lumpy-rug-day-may-3/


[Edited at 2015-08-27 16:21 GMT]


 
QHE
QHE
United States
Local time: 00:37
English to Chinese
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Aug 29, 2015

The roots of the word have been defined as follows:

super- "above", cali- "beauty", fragilistic- "delicate", expiali- "to atone", and -docious "educable"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Poppins




Mary Poppins - A Spoonful Of Sugar
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLkp_Dx6VdI

Chim Chim Cher-ee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_mpaF5-SlU

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRFHXMQP-QU

I Love To Laugh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOMqqI-kzHY

 
QHE
QHE
United States
Local time: 00:37
English to Chinese
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
“Supermoon” & Lunar Perigee Aug 29, 2015

Supermoon On Saturday, Lunar Perigee On Sunday

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/80346/20150829/supermoon-on-saturday-lunar-perigee-on-sunday-whats-the-difference-and-how-to-watch.htm
... See more
Supermoon On Saturday, Lunar Perigee On Sunday

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/80346/20150829/supermoon-on-saturday-lunar-perigee-on-sunday-whats-the-difference-and-how-to-watch.htm

http://news.discovery.com/space/astronomy/lunar-perigee-science-beyond-sundays-supermoon-150828.htm

Because the Earth is constantly revolving around the sun and the moon is constantly revolving around the Earth, a full moon is an instantaneous event, occurring when the moon is exactly opposite the sun. This week, such an alignment happens at 2:35 p.m. EDT (1835 GMT) on Saturday, Aug. 29.

A minute before that, the moon's phase is "waxing gibbous," and a minute later it is "waning gibbous."
Each full moon occurs roughly 29.53 days after the previous full moon. It's "roughly" because the moon's orbit around the Earth is not a perfect circle, but is instead elliptical in shape. So the exact time of full moon varies a little bit from month to month.

The most important result of the moon's elliptical orbit is that sometimes the moon is closer to the Earth, and sometimes farther away. The time when the satellite is nearest is called "perigee" and the time when it is farthest is called "apogee."

What sky watchers are most interested in is perigee, the date and time when the moon is closest to Earth. This month, perigee occurs on Sunday, Aug. 30, at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT), about 18 hours after full moon. At that time, the moon will be 222,631 miles (358,290 kilometers) away from Earth.



Looking ahead to next month, full moon will fall on Sunday, Sept. 27, at 10:51 p.m. EDT (0251 GMT on Sept. 28), and perigee just 51 minutes earlier, at 10 p.m. This perigee will be the closest in 2015, at 221,753 miles (356,877 km). The result will be the largest full moon of the year and even larger high tides.





[Edited at 2015-08-29 18:35 GMT]
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泰晤士(TIMES)四合院儿






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