Task 3

Machine Translation

At the end of the 1950s, researchers in the United States, Russia, and Western Europe were confident that high-quality machine translation (MT) of scientific and technical documents would be possible within a very few years. After the promise had remained unrealized for a decade, the National Academy of Sciences of the United States published the much cited but little read report of its Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee. The ALPAC Report recommended that the resources that were being expended on MT as a solution to immediate practical problems should be redirected towards more fundamental questions of language processing that would have to be answered before any translation machine could be built. The number of laboratories working in the field was sharply reduced all over the world, and few of them were able to obtain funding for more long-range research programs in what then came to be known as computational linguistics.

There was a resurgence of interest in machine translation in the 1980s and, although the approaches adopted differed little from those of the 1960s, many of the efforts, notably in Japan, were rapidly deemed successful. This seems to have had less to do with advances in linguistics and software technology or with the greater size and speed of computers than with a better appreciation of special situations where ingenuity might make a limited success of rudimentary MT. The most conspicuous example was the METEO system, developed at the University of Montreal, which has long provided the French translations of the weather reports used by airlines, shipping companies, and others. Some manufacturers of machinery have found it possible to translate maintenance manuals used within their organizations (not by their customers) largely automatically by having the technical writers use only certain words and only in carefully prescribed ways.

Why Machine Translation Is Hard

Many factors contribute to the difficulty of machine translation, including words with multiple meanings, sentences with multiple grammatical structures, uncertainty about what a pronoun refers to, and other problems of grammar. But two common misunderstandings make translation seem altogether simpler than it is. First, translation is not primarily a linguistic operation, and second, translation is not an operation that preserves meaning.

There is a famous old example that makes the first point well. Consider the sentence:

The police refused the students a permit because they feared violence.

Suppose that it is to be translated into a language like French in which the word for 'police' is feminine. Presumably the pronoun that translates 'they' will also have to be feminine. Now replace the word 'feared' with 'advocated'. Now, suddenly, it seems that 'they' refers to the students and not to the police and, if the word for students is masculine, it will therefore require a different translation. The knowledge required to reach these conclusions has nothing linguistic about it. It has to do with everyday facts about students, police, violence, and the kinds of relationships we have seen these things enter into.

The second point is, of course, closely related. Consider the following question, stated in French: Ou voulez-vous que je me mette? It means literally, "Where do you want me to put myself?" but it is a very natural translation for a whole family of English questions of the form "Where do you want me to sit/stand/sign my name/park/tie up my boat?" In most situations, the English "Where do you want me?" would be acceptable, but it is natural and routine to add or delete information in order to produce a fluent translation. Sometimes it cannot be avoided because there are languages like French in which pronouns must show number and gender, Japanese where pronouns are often omitted altogether, Russian where there are no articles, Chinese where nouns do not differentiate singular and plural nor verbs present and past, and German where flexibility of the word order can leave uncertainties about what is the subject and what is the object.

The Structure of Machine Translation Systems

While there have been many variants, most MT systems, and certainly those that have found practical application, have parts that can be named for the chapters in a linguistic text book. They have lexical, morphological, syntactic, and possibly semantic components, one for each of the two languages, for treating basic words, complex words, sentences and meanings. Each feeds into the next until a very abstract representation of the sentence is produced by the last one in the chain.

There is also a 'transfer' component, the only one that is specialized for a particular pair of languages, which converts the most abstract source representation that can be achieved into a corresponding abstract target representation. The target sentence is produced from this essentially by reversing the analysis process. Some systems make use of a so-called 'interlingua' or intermediate language, in which case the transfer stage is divided into two steps, one translating a source sentence into the interlingua and the other translating the result of this into an abstract representation in the target language.

Does the Language I Speak Influence the Way I Think?

Is it true that the language I speak shapes my thoughts?

People have been asking this question for hundreds of years. Linguists have been paying special attention to it since the 1940's, when a linguist named Benjamin Lee Whorf studied Hopi, a Native American language spoken in northeastern Arizona. Based on his studies, Whorf claimed that speakers of Hopi and speakers of English see the world differently because of differences in their language.

What we have learned is that the answer to this question is complicated. To some extent, it's a chicken-and-egg question: Are you unable to think about things you don't have words for, or do you lack words for them because you don't think about them? Part of the problem is that there is more involved than just language and thought; there is also culture. Your culture—the traditions, lifestyle, habits, and so on that you pick up from the people you live and interact with—shapes the way you think, and also shapes the way you talk.

There's a language called Guugu Yimithirr (spoken in North Queensland, Australia) that doesn't have words like left and right or front and back. Its speakers always describe locations and directions using the Guugu Yimithirr words for north, south, east, and west. So, they would never say that a boy is standing in front of a house; instead, they'd say he is standing (for example) east of the house. They would also, no doubt, think of the boy as standing east of the house, while a speaker of English would think of him as standing in front of the house. Has our language affected our way of thinking? Or has a difference in cultural habits affected both our thoughts and our language? Most likely, the culture, the thought habits, and the language have all grown up together.

The problem isn't restricted to individual words, either. In English, the form of the verb in a sentence tells whether it describes a past or present event (Mary walks vs. Mary walked). Hopi doesn't require that; instead, the forms of its verbs tell how the speaker came to know the information, so you would use different forms for first-hand knowledge (like I'm hungry) and generally known information (like the sky is blue). Of course, English speakers may choose to include such information (as in, I hear Mary passed the test), but it's not required. Whorf believed that because of this difference, Hopi speakers and English speakers think about events differently, with Hopi speakers focusing more on the source of the information and English speakers focusing more on the time of the event.

Objects are treated differently by the syntax of different languages as well. In English, some nouns (like bean) are 'countable' and can be made plural (beans), while others are 'mass' and can't be made plural (you can have two cups of rice but not two rices). Other languages, like Japanese, don't make this distinction; instead, classifiers like cupof are used for all nouns. Researchers are studying whether this property of the language makes English speakers more aware of the distinction between substances and individual objects.

Here's one more example. Whorf said that because English treats time as being broken up into chunks that can be counted—three days, four minutes, half an hour—English speakers tend to treat time as a group of objects—seconds, minutes, hours—instead of as a smooth unbroken stream. This, he said, makes us think that time is 'stuff' that can be saved, wasted, or lost. The Hopi, he said, don't talk about time in those terms, and so they think about it differently; for them it is a continuous cycle. But this doesn't necessarily mean that our language has forced a certain view of time on us; it could also be that our view of time is reflected in our language, or that the way we deal with time in our culture is reflected in both our language and our thoughts. It seems likely that language, thought, and culture form three strands of a braid, with each one affecting the others.

But people think in language, right?

Much of the time, yes. But not always. You can easily conjure up mental images and sensations that would be hard to describe in words. You can think about the sound of a symphony, the shape of a pear, or the smell of garlic bread. None of these thoughts require language.

So it's possible to think about something even if I don't have a word for it?

Yes. Take colors, for example. There are an infinite number of different colors, and they don't all have their own names. If you have a can of red paint and slowly add blue to it, drop by drop, it will very slowly change to a reddish purple, then purple, then bluish purple. Each drop will change the color very slightly, but there is no one moment when it will stop being red and become purple. The color spectrum is continuous. Our language, however, isn't continuous. Our language makes us break the color spectrum up into 'red', 'purple', and so on.

The Dani of New Guinea have only two basic color terms in their language, one for 'dark' colors (including blue and green) and one for 'light' colors (including yellow and red). Their language breaks up the color spectrum differently from ours. But that doesn't mean they can't see the difference between yellow and red; studies have shown that they can see different colors just as English speakers can.

In Russian, there are two different words for light blue and dark blue. Does this mean that Russian speakers think of these as 'different' colors, while having one word (blue) causes English speakers to think of them as the same? Maybe. Do you think of red and pink as different colors? If so, you may be under the influence of your language; after all, pink is really just light red.

So our language doesn't force us to see only what it gives us words for, but it can affect how we put things into groups. One of the jobs of a child learning language is to figure out which things are called by the same word. After learning that the family's St. Bernard is a dog, the child may see a cow and say dog, thinking that the two things count as the same. Or the child may not realize that the neighbor's chihuahua also counts as a dog. The child has to learn what range of objects is covered by the worddog. We learn to group things that are similar and give them the same label, but what counts as being similar enough to fall under a single label may vary from language to language.

In other words, the influence of language isn't so much on what we can think about, or even what we do think about, but rather on how we break up reality into categories and label them. And in this, our language and our thoughts are probably both greatly influenced by our culture.

But what about all those Eskimo words for snow?

You may have heard it said that Eskimos have dozens (or even hundreds!) of words for snow. People often use this claim to show that the way we view the world and the way we talk about it are closely related. But it's simply not true that Eskimos have an extraordinary number of words for snow. First of all, there isn't just one Eskimo language; the people we refer to as 'Eskimos' speak a variety of languages in the Inuit and Yupik language families. And even if we pick a single dialect of a single language, we won't find much evidence that it has more words for snow than English does. For one thing, there's the question of what counts as a word: In English, we can combine words to get compound forms like snowball and snowflake, and we can add what are called 'inflectional' endings to get snowed and snowing. The Eskimo languages have far more word-forming processes than English does, so a single 'root' word (like snow) could be the basis for hundreds of related words. It hardly seems fair to count each one of these separately. If you only count the roots, you'll find that these languages aren't that different from English. After all, English has lots of words for snow; we've got snow, sleet, slush, frost, blizzard, avalanche, drift, powder, and flurry, and if you're an avid skier, you probably know even more.

So learning a different language won't change the way I think?

Task 4

Falling Oil Prices - Winners and Losers

For the first time in four years, the price of oil has been decreasing steadily.  At the moment, it is down to $60 to $80 per barrel after years of prices above $100. And there are no signs of prices going up in the near future.

One of the reasons for the fall of oil prices is that there is more than enough oil on the world markets.  Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer has tried to stabilize the prices by producing less oil but other OPEC members have reacted by producing more oil.

Another reason for the cut in oil prices is that the United States has been producing more and more energy from fracking. The oil that is trapped in the rocks of the western US can be extracted at a cheaper price. This means that the US can produce more oil itself and does not have to import oil from foreign markets.

The decrease in oil prices is expected to help the world’s economy. Especially in Europe, the downward movement of oil price is expected to be good for the economy.  China and Japan should also profit from falling oil prices, as they must import almost all of their oil. In most cases low oil prices means lower inflation and people spending more money on goods. Cheap oil prices may also influence the travel market as airline fuel costs should drop.

Some oil exporting countries are the big losers of this downward slide in oil prices. Most of them, for example Venezuela, need higher oil prices to pay for government programs and secure the economy. Russia also needs income from oil and gas. The two natural resources bring the country 70% of its income.  In addition to the falling value of the rouble, the Russian currency, the country also misses over 2 billion dollars of income per year.

On the other side, falling energy prices will not affect Middle Eastern countries that much. The oil producing states of the Gulf region have enough money to withstand lower oil prices for some time.

Translate from Russian into English

Task 1

ДОГОВОР № 6

НА ПОСТАВКУ ТОВАРОВ НА ЭКСПОРТ

г.____________ «___»___________20___г.

__________ (указывается наименование объединения, предприятия, организации), именуемое в дальнейшем «Продавец», в лице ____________, действующего на основании Устава и _________ (указывается наименование внешнеэкономической организации), именуемая в дальнейшем «Покупатель», в лице ___________________, действующего на основании Устава заключили настоящий договор о нижеследующем:

1. Продавец обязуется поставить, а Покупатель принять и оплатить товары: ________ (указывается наименование товаров, их количество, номенклатура или ассортимент, комплектность)

2. Поставка производится в следующие сроки: ________ (указать сроки: поквартально, ежемесячно равными партиями, равными партиями ежедекадно, ежесуточно, по согласованным графикам и др.)

3. Качество товаров должно соответствовать:__________ (указываются номера, индексы, даты утверждения и органы, их утвердившие: международных стандартов, национальных стандартов, технических условий; описываются образцы (эталоны), порядок их представления и хранения; специальные технические условия, установленные для товаров, экспортируемых в районы с тропическим и влажным климатом) Дополнительные требования к качеству поставляемой продукции:_______

Соответствие качества товара условиям договора и заключенного с иностранным покупателем контракта должно подтверждаться сертификатом или другим документом, выдаваемым изготовителем или другой организацией по установленной форме.

Продавец обязан поставить сверх запасных частей и принадлежностей, обеспечивающих использование товаров в пределах гарантийных сроков также ____________ (указывается номенклатура и количество запасных частей и принадлежностей, необходимых для обеспечения использования товаров в послегарантийный период).

Продавец несет ответственность за качество товаров в пределах гарантийных сроков, исчисляемых с момента проследования товаров через государственную границу РФ (указывается иной момент начала исчисления гарантийного срока).

Гарантийные сроки составляют ______________________________.

4. Продавец не позднее _______ рабочих дней после отгрузки товара для экспорта направляет Покупателю документы: __________________ (указывается перечень документов).

Расчеты между сторонами за товары производятся по ценам: _______ (указывается наименование, дата утверждения и орган, утвердивший обязательный для сторон документ о цене, либо цена, определенная сторонами самостоятельно).

Порядок расчетов: ___________. Отчисления в пользу Покупателя составляют: __________(указывается определенный в установленном порядке размер отчислений).

5. Поставка товаров Продавцом производится в установленные договором сроки, в соответствии с уведомлениями о необходимости производить отгрузку, полученными от Покупателя, содержащими все данные, необходимые для отгрузки. Досрочная поставка допускается только с согласия Покупателя.

Сдача товара Продавцом Покупателю будет производиться _______ (указывается пункт сдачи товара, способы и условия его транспортировки).Продавец извещает Покупателя о готовности товара к отгрузке в следующем порядке: ____

6. Тара и упаковка должны соответствовать: _____ (указываются стандарты, технические условия, другая техническая документация; указываются конкретные требования к таре, упаковке). Дополнительные требования к таре и упаковке: ____________________

Товар должен маркироваться ________ (на прикрепляемой бирке, иной способ маркировки).

Продавец использует следующие способы транспортировки и обес-печения сохранности товаров: ____________ (контейнеры, средства па-кетирования, иные способы).

7. _____ (указываются отгрузочные реквизиты, если известны при заключении договора).

8. Техническая и товаросопроводительная документация включает: _____________ (указываются соответствующие виды документации, предусмотренные действующим законодательством; по доверенности сторон с учетом требований иностранного покупателя и другие подтверждающие надлежащее качество товара) и должна оформляться и рассылаться __________ (указывается порядок оформления и рассылки документации).

Техническая и товаросопроводительная документация составляется ______ (на русском языке, на ______ языке).

Предприятие обязано до начала отгрузки товаров обеспечить за свой счет издание проспектов, инструкций по применению, эксплуатации и ремонту машин, оборудования и приборов, а также каталогов запасных частей к ним.

Проспекты, инструкции и каталоги составляются на _____ (русском, русском и ____ языках).

9. Настоящий договор действует в течение ______ (5 лет, года, иной период действия с момента его заключения)

10. Прочие условия: ________________________________________

11. Взаимоотношения сторон в части, не предусмотренной настоящим договором, регулируются Основными условиями регулирования договорных отношений при осуществлении экспортно-импортных операций.

12. К договору прилагаются: _____ (приводится перечень приложений).

13. Юридические адреса и реквизиты сторон:

Продавец:

Покупатель:

14. Подписи сторон:

ДОГОВОР № 7

О КУПЛЕ-ПРОДАЖЕ ТОВАРОВ

г. Москва «____»____________2006г.

_____г. Москва, РФ, именуемое ниже ПОКУПАТЕЛЬ, в лице ________, действующего на основании Устава, с одной стороны, и _______, именуемое ниже ПРОДАВЕЦ, в лице _____________, действующего на основании Устава, с другой стороны, заключили настоящий договор о нижеследующем:

1. Предмет контракта

Продавец продал, а Покупатель купил товары:_______ на нижеуказанных условиях и в соответствии с «Общими условиями продажи», изложенными на оборотной стороне настоящего Договора.