Some people think that machine translation is highly developed in today's society. Therefore it is not necessary for children to learn a foreign language. What's your opinion?
It will be goog news for school children when they are told that foreign language is no longer a required subject because translation can all be done by machines. But is it wise to be so optimistic even after taking account of the advance in machine translation? Personally, I rather doubt it.
Computer-aided translation is far from doing a satisfactory job at the present stage of development. Machine translation has encountered seemingly insurmountable obstacles when dealing with written language. For example, it is having a hard time recognizing rhtoricat expressions such as metaphors, puns and irony, which, it must be admitted, can sometimes present problems to common readers as well. when it comes to interpreting spoken languages, machine translation is further crippled by the mediocre performance of speech recognition technology. Thus, translators and interpreters are in no danger of losing their jobs in the foreseeable future.
Moreover, even if machine translation were able to eradicate all the language barriers between peoples, would there be no point in learning foreign languages? By no means, in the process of studying a language, one gets interested in its people, its culture, and its society. By understanding their language, we start to understand the people, for the language often exerts a subtle influence upon its people. What's more, each language is unique. The beauty of a language is what fascinates the students. French is known to be a romantic language; Chinese is renowned for its flexibility; Japanese for its politeness. All those distinctions would be lost if they are translated into one's own language.
The happy scenes in Star Trek where people from different planets can communicate comfortably with a 'translation machine' still belong to science fiction. And I would still encourage students to learn foreign languages even after such machines are made available.
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