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December
1970
a few hours a day translating. A great
deal of the rest of his time is taken up
with
stlfd)'
for his job.
Simul taneous t ranslating is far more
exacting than just expressing words
from one language in the words of
another language. Daniel Seleskovitch,
who heads ao interpreter's school,
explains why:
"A good interpreter must be as
intelligent, or at least as
au cottrallJ
(fully ioformed) with the subject
under discussion, as the person he is
interpreting for. The idea is oot to
translate literally, but to achieve the
same impact as the speaker."
But translators face another problem.
A language not used soon begins to
erode away. The
comlant sllfdy
by U.N.
interpreters is the
onl; u·a)
10
sta;
bi/ing11al.
Otherwise, the exact word
needed migbt slip the interpreter's
mind. Many foreigners have also found
this out, to their chagrín, after taking
up residency in another country. When
they have used their adopted tongue for
severa! years, they often find to their
cmbarrassment they have consciously
forgollen
much of thcir childhood
speech!
No matter what the high hopes of
some teachers and students, the truly
bilingual person will always be a tiny
drop in the ocean, even among educated
men. Presently, there are only
800
or
900
qualified conference translators
111
the world.
The language problem
cannoJ
be
solvcd by language-educating bílínguists.
Computers Baffled !
But what about machine translation
- the use of computers to bypass the
laborious process of traditional trans–
lation ? Few are optimistic about the
future of computerized translation. The
majority of experts are glum.
The idea of machine translation may
souod fine to the
layman,
mesmerized
by glittering modern technology. But
there are
frmdamentrtl
difficulties which
have yet to be solved.
As previously mentioned, there is
more to translation than substituting
one word for another. Humorous exam–
ples abound to illustrate the problems in
machine translation. There is the prov-
Tbe
PLAIN TRUTH
erb,
"The
spirit is willing but the flesh
is weak," which carne out in Russían as
"The wioe is promising but the meat
has gone bad." Or the saying, "Out of
sight, out of mind," which appeared as
"invisible idiot''!
Machines can translate up to
20,000
words an hour. But to do tbis, their
input must be specially prepared. There
output must then be edited - a job
"painfully time-consuming and more
straining for the human post-editor
than is straight human translation"
(Science News,
March
18, 1967).
The Automatic Language Processing
Advisory Committee of the National
Academy of Sciences' National Research
Council has actually
1·ecommended
that
no more money be spent
for
mechanicttl
Jrmuiation resettrrh.
This committee is
concerned mainly with translation for
science.
It
was looking at the problem
from the practica! angle. Were the
translat ions usable?
The Committee's research found the
answer to
be
a definíte "No!" "The
members found unedited machine out–
put to
lx:
'dt-cipherable for the most
part' but 'somctimes misleading and
sometimes wrong,' and 'slow and pain–
ful reading'"
(Science,
Jan.
6, 1967).
The Committee concluded that the solu–
tion was still the use
of
hmnrtll
translation.
This is the problem as it staods. Even
in our advanced civilization, we must
still resort to human translators for
communication between natioos.
We have now looked at linguistic
education for each individual. Hopeless.
We have examined the skills of profes–
sional translators and simultaneous
interpreters. Slow, expensive, and not
enough to go around. And finally we
have asked whether computers were the
solution. But thc answcr was pessimistic.
This brings us to the inevitable
conclusion echoed by thousands of lin–
guists and hymen down through the
centuries:
WE MUST HAVE ONE
WORLD LANGUAGE.
This is the
only
sotution
to
problems created
barrier.
thc communicatíons
by the language
But what are the possibilities of
achieving this goal? Can it be done?
What are the problems involved?
International Laoguage
Impossible?
37
Man has beco trying to unite the
world with a single universal language
as long as language düferences have
existed.
We
are no nearer the solution
today than beforc.
It
seems that when a
particular language begíns to
be
rated as
a "universal Janguage," tbe nation that
spreads it begins to decay and fall apart.
Then the language falls into disuse.
Half a millennium before Cbrist, the
Assyro-Babylonian Empire spread
Ara–
maic
over the entirety of the Middle
East as a common language of commu–
nication. This was the language Jesus of
Nazareth commonly spoke. This was the
language used to record a significant
portian of the Old Testarnent. Aramaic
!asted many centurics as a
lingM frant'a.
The language is barely alive today
an1ong perhaps
100,000
people in the
Middle East.
Next came the Hellenistic
Greek
which spread f rom
Greece
to India to
Italy. It was thc common language of
diplomacy and trade throughout the
Roman Empire, and even in Rome itself
during the eady days of the Cacsars.
lt
served
as
thc vehicle for the transmis–
sion of the New Testament and much
of the early Church writings.
But it too díed when the Graeco–
Macedonían culture disintegrated.
Duríng the later
Roman
Empire,
Ltttin
gained the ascendancy over Greek in the
West and served as a semi-universal
language for over a thousand years.
During the Middle Ages one could
travel from one cnd of Europe to the
other knowing only Latín. Books were
written in it. Official documents were
recorded in it. University dasses were
conductcd in it. Yet only the educated
minority actually kncw the
langu<~ge.
The majority
of
people did not know
how to read and writc their
oun
lan–
guage, much less Latín.
Today, Latín is called a "dead lan–
guage" -
used only
10
scientific
terminology.
During the last two centuries or so,
French
repJaced Latin as the language
of culture and diplomacy. This exalted
positíon was held until World War
J,
whereupon it declined rapidly, as did
the influence of the French nation. The
title of "universal language" is now