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arrow_back Aula 09 - Coesão e coerência: elementos essenciais de um texto

Atividade 03

To Translate or Not to Translate?

Sure enough, machine translation (MT) is a valuable tool when heavy-duty translation services are needed. "Copy editing" output from machine-translated pages generally costs less than half the price charged for translating a page from scratch. But the thing is, people have to learn not only how to read MT, but also how to write for it. In other words, for results to be accurate as possible, machine-translate texts have to be extensively pre- and pos-edited by experienced human translators. For the software to become cost-effective, the time the translator would have taken by hand must be significantly reduced.

Software manufactures are concerned that MT's usefulness is being overestimated, and that the public, getting disappointing results, might dismiss the technology forever. But AltaVista's technical director insists the Web tool is worthwhile, particularly for English-challenged or non-English speakers, since around 70 percent of Web pages are in that language: "If you're sitting in the U.S. and speak English, just about whatever you search for you'll find. You get this impression that English is enough. If you live outside the U.S., and, let's say, you speak Italian, you only get access to 1-2 percent of the Web. For those people, the Web is pretty opaque."

In spite of the on-going jokes – such as the one that alleges that back-translation of the English proverb "Out of sight, out of mind" from Russian got "Invisible idiot" as a result – it seems MT is here to stay. With some patience and an open mind, people can work (and, no doubt, have lots of fun) with it. As says the chief technical officer of Globalink, an MT software maker, "We offer communication where the other option is no communication."

Fonte: Adaptado de Cruz, Silva e Rosas (2006, p. 139).

Read the text below and answer the questions according to it.

  1. Underline the cohesive devices that appear in the text above. They can be repeated words, referential words or connectors.
  2. What does it (1st paragraph) refer to? How do you know?
  3. What does that language (2nd paragraph) refer to? How do you know?
  4. What two ideas (propositions) does but also (1st paragraph) connect?
  5. O que é preciso para que o programa de tradução automática se torne vantajoso em termos de custo?
  6. Qual a preocupação dos fabricantes de programas de tradução automática?
  7. Qual o argumento que o diretor técnico da Altavista usa para refutar essa preocupação?

Para verificar suas respostas, clique aqui.

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