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Essay Available:
Pages:
4 pages/β‰ˆ1100 words
Sources:
2 Sources
Style:
MLA
Subject:
Literature & Language
Type:
Essay
Language:
English (U.S.)
Document:
MS Word
Date:
Total cost:
$ 14.4
Topic:

Article Summary: The Shallowness of Google Translate

Essay Instructions:

Hi, you just need to summarize a article from a website. There are two resources you need to read before writing article and a PDF. You need to read the whole article and the FIRST chapter of the PDF. The instruction my professor gave me is down below.
Read Douglas Hofstadter's recent Atlantic magazine article on Machine Translation and summarize it using your own language in 1000 words. There are three languages that the author picks as case studies - French, German, and Mandarin. Pick one of them and discuss the issues that arise in translating this language. If you have reading competency in another language, you could conduct experiments similar to the ones Hofstadter conducts on your language of choice and report the results.
Keep in mind that the article is long and 1000 words is not a lot. So your first task is to identify what you think the important ideas are in this article and then decide how to summarize them. The goal of the project is to summarize -- so you'll largely be reporting the views of the author. But towards the end you can give your personal take of the discussion as long as you make it clear that this is your viewpoint. Also note that while you summarizing someone else's ideas, you still have to do it in your words. You cannot directly take chunks of text from the article. That would count as plagiarism.
Here's the structure your essay should have:
1. Short introductory paragraph
2. Discussion of issues that arise in translating your language of choice
[this could be more than one paragraph]
3. Discussion of why Google Translate is limited in the way it is
[this could be more than one paragraph]
The final paragraph should wrap things up.
To get some tips on how to write well, you could read the first few chapters of Steven Pinker's book "The Sense of Style". They are attached below.
We will grade you on content and on style. Use spell checkers and avoid spelling mistakes.

Essay Sample Content Preview:
[Name of the Student]
[Name of the Institute]
[Date]
Topic: Article Review
Article Summary – The Shallowness of Google Translate
Introduction
Douglas Richard Hofstadter is a well-known American lecturer particularly of cognitive science as well as he is a lifelong admirer of the human minds’. Hofstadter has not only written several interesting books and articles, but also the most interesting books and articles on translation. However, it can be stated that Hofstadter has a deep sensitivity to language. In this article “The Shallowness of Google Translate,” he has significantly emphasized on Google translate (Hofstadter, n.d). He prominently mentioned his personal standpoints based on everyday intricacies that translation machines such as Google Translate cannot easily handle. The author has effectively criticized Google translator and clearly mentioned that the translation machines software has always led him to be extremely skeptical. His prime focus in this particular article was on three languages: German, French, and Chinese. The purpose of this paper is to entail an in-depth analysis of the article along with the summary, issues that arise in translating German language and the limitation of Google translate.
Discussion
Hofstadter in his article has shared his personal point of view based on the translating machine Google translate. The author opines that there are numerous thoughtful individuals who are quite enamored of translation programs and this to some extent perplexes the author. Hofstadter as a prominent impassioned translator has been following the trend of attempting to mechanize translation for a number of decades. Additionally, he stated in his article that people who are involved in translating process would become simple quality controllers and fixers for various faults, rather than producers of new content. According to Hofstadter, translation is an unbelievably understated art that draws persistently on one's several years of experience in a lifetime, and on one's creative thoughts (Hofstadter, n.d). The article also explained that the Google translate can easily handle an extensive range of languages. However, the in-depth explanation of the article was limited to only three languages as German, French, and Chinese.
The author himself is considerably doubtful about Google translate but in contrast, he mentioned few astonishing facts about Google Translate. For instance, Google translate is accessible to every individual without any cost and it can convert any language into the other language within few seconds. The author calls himself ‘pi-lingual’ whereas, he titled Google Translate as ‘bi-lingual'. Moreover, the article pointed out that machine translation has never emphasized on the key understandings of every language. In contrast, the field has always tried to "decode" in order to get away without distressing the concept of understanding and meaning of a word. Furthermore, the author has focused on the misunderstandings and incorrect usage of words and sentences which is most commonly made by Google translate. All three languages have been discussed with an in-depth knowledge including the issues which arises while translating it and the limita...
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