譯/范夢栩 審訂/馬士奎

But they are still astonishingly useful.

但它們依然極其有用。

Arab newspapers have a reputation,partly deserved, for tamely1tamely乖乖地，馴服地。taking the of fi cial line. On any given day, for example, you might read that “a source close to the Iranian Foreign Ministry toldAl-Hayatthat ‘Tehran will continue to abide by the terms of the nuclear agreement as long as the other side does the same.’” But the exceptional thing about this unexceptional story is that,thanks to Google, English-speaking readers can now read this in the Arab papers themselves.

[2] In the past few months free online translators have suddenly got much better. This may come as a surprise to those who have tried to make use of them in the past. But in November Google unveiled a new version of Translate. The old version, called “phrase-based” ma-

阿拉伯報紙以為官方代言著稱，從某種程度上說，此言不虛。比如說，隨便在哪天的報紙上，都可能就會讀到類似的話：“一位同伊朗外交部關(guān)系密切的人士告訴《生活日報》，‘只要對方遵守核協(xié)議，德黑蘭也會遵守?！边@本不是什么新鮮事兒，然而其背后非同尋常之處在于，借助谷歌翻譯，英語國家的讀者如今可以直接閱讀這則阿拉伯語新聞了。

[2]最近數(shù)月，免費在線翻譯平臺突然大有改觀。與以往用戶體驗相比，簡直能用驚喜來形容。11月，谷歌公司推出了新版谷歌翻譯。其舊版為基于詞組的機器翻譯，即把chine translation, worked on hunks of a sentence separately, with an output that was usually choppy and often inaccurate.

[3] The new system uses an artificial neural network, linking digital“neurons” in several layers, each one feeding its output to the next layer, in an approach that is loosely modelled on the human brain. Neural-translation systems, like the phrase-based systems before them, are fi rst “trained” by huge volumes of text translated by humans.But the neural version takes each word,and uses the surrounding context to turn it into a kind of abstract digital representation. It then tries to fi nd the closest matching representation in the target language, based on what it has learned before. Neural translation handles long sentences much better than previous versions did.

[4] The new Google Translate began by translating eight languages to and from English, most of them European.It is much easier for machines (and humans) to translate between closely related languages. But Google has also extended its neural engine to languages like Chinese (included in the fi rst batch)and, more recently, to Arabic, Hebrew,Russian and Vietnamese, an exciting leap forward for these la. Microsoft also has a neural system for several hard languages.

[5] Google Translate does still oc-句子拆分成語塊然后逐個翻譯，譯文常常支離破碎，而且不夠準確。

[3]新版的翻譯原理是利用人工神經(jīng)網(wǎng)絡(luò)系統(tǒng)，將數(shù)個層次之間的數(shù)字“神經(jīng)元”連接起來，每個神經(jīng)元直接將結(jié)果輸送到下一層次。這就類似人腦的運作方式。與舊版基于詞組的翻譯系統(tǒng)一樣，這種神經(jīng)網(wǎng)絡(luò)翻譯系統(tǒng)也要接受大量人工翻譯文本的“訓(xùn)練”。但后者以詞為單位處理文本，還會根據(jù)語境將詞匯轉(zhuǎn)換為一種抽象的數(shù)字化表述，然后根據(jù)之前的學(xué)習(xí)，從目標語中找出與原詞最接近的表達。神經(jīng)網(wǎng)絡(luò)翻譯系統(tǒng)處理長句的能力比之前幾個版本都高出不少。

[4]新版谷歌翻譯始于英語同其他8種語言之間的互譯，以歐洲語言為主。無論對機器還是對人類來說，在關(guān)系密切的語言之間進行翻譯總要容易許多。當(dāng)然，這種神經(jīng)網(wǎng)絡(luò)翻譯系統(tǒng)已經(jīng)涵蓋其他一些語言，比如中文（首批8種語言之一），近期又擴展到阿拉伯語、希伯來語、俄語和越南語。微軟公司同樣開發(fā)了一種可以處理幾種復(fù)雜語言的翻譯系統(tǒng)。

[5]谷歌翻譯在處理句子casionally garble sentences. The introduction to aHaaretzstory in Hebrew had text that Google translated as: “According to the results of the truth in the first round of the presidential elections,Macaron and Le Pen went to the second round on May 7. In third place are Francois Peyon of the Right and Jean-Luc of Lanschon on the far left.” If you don’t know what this is about, it is nigh on2nigh on幾乎；差不多。useless. But if you know that it is about the French election, you can see that the engine has badly translated“samples of the official results” as “results of the truth”. It has also given odd transliterations for (Emmanuel) Macron and (Fran?ois) Fillon (P and F can be the same letter in Hebrew). And it has done something particularly funny with Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s surname. “Me-” can mean “of” in Hebrew. The system is“dumb”, having no way of knowing that Mr Mélenchon is a French politician. It has merely been trained on lots of text previously translated from Hebrew to English.

[6] Such fairly predictable errors should gradually be winnowed3winnow甄別；篩去。out as the programmers improve the system.But some “mistakes” from neuraltranslation systems can seem mysterious.Users have found that typing in random characters in languages such as Thai, for example, results in Google producing時偶爾也會斷章取義。以色列《國土報》曾刊登過一則希伯來語的新聞導(dǎo)語，谷歌翻譯結(jié)果如下：According to the results of the truth in the first round of the presidential elections, Macaron and Le Pen went to the second round on May 7. In third place are Francois Peyon of the Right and Jean-Luc of Lanschon on the far left. 如果你對相關(guān)背景一無所知，這段譯文基本沒有意義。但是倘若你知道文章涉及法國大選，就會發(fā)現(xiàn)譯文拙劣之處，竟然將samples of the official results（抽檢的官方數(shù)據(jù)）譯為results of the truth（事實的結(jié)果）。此外，人名Emmanuel (Macron)和 (Fran?ois) Fillon（在希伯來語中P和F可能是同一個字母）也音譯得很古怪。尤為可笑的是，谷歌還把讓-呂克·梅朗雄的姓氏搞錯了。Me-在希伯來語中的意思為of（屬于……的）。翻譯系統(tǒng)很“呆”，無法了解到梅朗雄先生其實是一位法國政客，它只是接受過先前大量英譯希伯來語文本的訓(xùn)練。

[6]程序員將會不斷完善翻譯系統(tǒng)，這種可以預(yù)見的錯誤想必會隨之逐步得到修正。oddly surreal “translations” like: “There are six sparks in the sky, each with six spheres. The sphere of the sphere is the sphere of the sphere.”

[7] Although this might put a few postmodern poets out of work, neuraltranslation systems aren’t ready to replace humans any time soon. Literature requires far too supple4supple（思想等）反應(yīng)靈活的。an understanding of the author’s intentions and culture for machines to do the job. And for critical work—technical, financial or legal,say—small mistakes (of which even the best systems still produce plenty) are unacceptable; a human will at the very least have to be at the wheel55 be at the wheel掌舵；控制。to vet and edit the output of automatic systems.

[8] Online translating is of great benefit to the globally curious. Many people long to see what other cultures are reading and talking about, but have no time to learn the languages. Though still finding its feet, the new generation of translation software dangles the promise of being able to do just that. ■但是神經(jīng)網(wǎng)絡(luò)翻譯系統(tǒng)的一些“錯誤”可能讓人難以理解。某些用戶發(fā)現(xiàn)，當(dāng)你隨便輸入某種語言（比如泰語）的幾個字詞，谷歌翻譯竟然會生成超現(xiàn)實派的“譯文”，比如：There are six sparks in the sky, each with six spheres. The sphere of the sphere is the sphere of the sphere.

[7]這或許會讓少數(shù)后現(xiàn)代主義詩人丟掉飯碗，不過短期內(nèi)神經(jīng)網(wǎng)絡(luò)翻譯尚無法取代人工翻譯。文學(xué)翻譯要求譯者能夠靈活把握作者意圖和文化背景，機器翻譯顯然力不能及。在翻譯科技、金融或法律等關(guān)鍵領(lǐng)域的文本時，容不得半點差池（而縱使最先進的翻譯系統(tǒng)也有層出不窮的小差錯），至少還需要人工譯員把關(guān)，校對和編輯自動翻譯的結(jié)果。

[8]對于對世界充滿好奇心的人來說，在線翻譯的確是一大福音。許多人渴望了解其他文化環(huán)境中的人在讀些什么，談些什么，但是又沒有時間學(xué)習(xí)那些語言。新一代翻譯軟件盡管還處于起步階段，但它或許能夠幫助人們實現(xiàn)這一愿望。 □