LONGMAN Dictionary of Contemporary English

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Oxford Advanced Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary

With content from OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

English text originally published as Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (Ninth Edition) by Oxford University Press. Great Clarendon Street, Oxford(C Oxford University Press 2015

This English-Chinese edition published by The Commercial Press (商务印书馆) by arrangement with Oxford University Press (China) Ltd for distribution in the mainland of China only and not for export therefrom (从那里)

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Translation is a very important tool for effective communication. A common way of getting any translation done is to turn to human translators. However, machine translators have developed rapidly in recent years. Many people say they will take the place of human translators soon.【小题1】

Machines may fail to understand culture properly. Different cultures have different words that are unique to that specific, culture. Machines cannot understand or recognize idioms, slang, and allusions(典故).【小题2】By contrast，human translators can find the suitable equivalent (对应物) in the target language based on the cultural background.

【小题3】 In different languages, there are words with various meanings, which can be a problem for machine translators. These words have to be placed in context to decide their true meanings, and in many cases only human translators can do this. If you run a document with this kind of words through a machine translator, it may lead to incorrect translations.

It is difficult to localize machines for different languages. New phrases are being developed in almost all languages.【小题4】If you feed new words into a machine translator, the machine might go “speechless” trying to come up with the most proper way to translate the strange words. Human translators, on the other hand, can pick up on the development in a language quickly.

It’s difficult for machines to recognize style and tone. Every written document has different style and tone. A document can have poetic, funny or persuasive style and tone. Machine translators may lose the intended tone and style existing in the original document.【小题5】And such a translation can hardly resonate (引起共鸣) with the person who reads it.

The Wampanoag language was not dead. To call it dead would be an insult to the ancestors who left it for future generations as a way to communicate-and a way to teach. But it was “unspoken” until linguist Jessie “Little Doe” Baird brought it back. Her project’s Wampanoag dictionary holds more than 11,000 entries.

Words on paper are not a language. A language lives through the people who speak it. So Baird founded the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project. She teaches community classes and family camps. Kids in grade school and high school have the opportunity to learn the language.

The Wampanoags have lived for 12,000 years in Massachusetts and parts of Rhode Island. When the Pilgrims (清教徒) met the first Indigenous people, those were the Wampanoags. The English settlers brought disease that killed thousands-an estimated two-thirds of the Wampanoag Nation died-as well as war and rules that fragmented (分裂) the tribes. There once were 69 tribes in the nation; now there are three. Baird is a citizen of the Mashpee tribe. Her ancestors left a key to their language. They translated the King James Bible into Wampanoag. They left hundreds of documents in their written alphabet (字母表).

Baird describes a vision she had where her ancestors helped her see it was time to bring the language home. She began her research, which led her to a graduate degree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she learned from and worked with other linguists. In 2010, she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, earning a “genius grant” to further her work.

“It’s incredibly difficult to reclaim a language, even more so when there are no speakers alive, and even more so when you’re driving 90 minutes a day, each way, to attend graduate school, with four small children at home.”

“I might have been afraid to do the work had I known that,” Baird says with a laugh now. “But I didn’t, and so here we are.”