单选题
Professional language translators labor in a
business that is unorganized and haphazard. Most are freelancers, contracting
with book publishers, marketing companies, product document producers, or anyone
else requiring language translation. While many large cities boast resources for
translation, like the German cultural center Goethe Institute, corporations
looking for professional translators usually hire locally, especially for the
more obscure languages. The result is that language translation remains one of
the few services in the globalized economy not networked in a significant
way. World Point, a management-software developer, wants to
change that by consolidating the language-translation business. Deploying its
network of 6,000 independent translators from around the world, the company can
translate a corporate Web site into potentially 75 languages and then provide
software to manage the resulting multilingual site. Word
Point's Passport software works like other Web-site management packages,
offering webmasters a way to centrally administer Web development, such as
iteration controls, HTML authoring, reporting, cookie manipulation, and a
built-in database-scripting language. Where the software distinguishes itself is
in its ability to support multiple languages. The multilingual-content
management tool has such innovations as single-click language addition, easy
localization to target languages using the company's translation service, speedy
language importation, and an automatic language search engine and site map
generation. "Before the Internet, translators were limited to
their local translation shops," said Michael Demetrios, chief architect at World
Point. "Our system is designed to facilitate collaboration. You can use someone
locally, but you really don't want someone who left, say, Germany, 15 years ago
and isn't current on the latest words. Especially on the Web, new words are
coming into languages at a very fast rate." The translation
business is set to boom, according to researchers. The market for text-based
language translation is predicted to climb from US$10.4 billion in 1998 to $17.2
billion in 2003, according to a report recently released by Allied Business
Intelligence, an analyst group in Oyster Bay, New York. The Internet has spurred
the explosive growth of translation, according to the report, calling it the
"single most significant future market" for translation. World
Point, whose customers include Kodak and Nippon Telephone & Telegraph, plans
to capture part of that growth by offering the largest network of independent
translators. World Point pays its translators by the word.
Asian languages cost more than European, and the average cost to establish a
multilingual Web site usually runs from $20,000 to $1 million. The company's
translators are proficient in everything from Spanish to dead languages like Old
English. World Point guarantees the sites will read fluently and be culturally
sensitive. World Point's software leverages economies of scale
by allowing translators to work as a team, with each translator converting about
2,000 to 3,000 words a day into another language. Despite the logic of
networking, translators remain wary of affiliating their services with
centralized companies, according to Demetrios. "A lot of them are watching us to
see how it goes," he says. If the Internet is responsible for
translators finding more business at their doorsteps, computers also provide a
cautionary flip side: speeding the day in which consolidation and specialization
will be necessary. Automation in particular may play a role in the conversion of
the translation business from mom-and-pop operators to an organized
industry. While Demetrios dismisses the near-term impact of
computer-translation software, the European Union reports that machine
translation of documents rose from 2,000 pages in 1988 to 250,000 pages last
year.
单选题
Why is language translation one of the few remaining services in the
globalized economy that is not networked in a significant way?
A. Because corporations in need of translators prefer to hire them on the
spot.
B. Because most large cities have their own translation centers.
C. Because they have not been organized into unions.
D. Because the majority of professional translators work on their
own.
【正确答案】
D
【答案解析】
单选题
In what way can World Point's Passport software provide improved
translation services?
A. By providing a network of professional translators even for obscure
languages.
B. By providing various kinds of multilingual web-site management
packages.
C. By providing an indispensable system for multilingual translation.
D. By providing management tools for all kinds of translation
software.
【正确答案】
A
【答案解析】
单选题
What is a problem with locally-hired translators?
A. They cost more to hire than translators residing in their home
countries.
B. They can only be employed through local translation shops.
C. They have lost touch with the new words of their mother tongue.
D. They are usually elderly people who have left their native countries many
years ago.
【正确答案】
C
【答案解析】
单选题
What is an advantage of World Point's software?
A. It can lower the cost of translation projects by employing translators to
work as a team.
B. It can capture the lion's share of the translation market by offering the
largest network of translators.
C. It can facilitate the employment of translators of obscure or dead
languages by corporations.
D. It can help independent translators to form close connections with
centralized translation companies.
【正确答案】
A
【答案解析】
单选题
What does the author mean by saying that the involvement of computers
in translation has a flip side?
A. It would mean the replacement of human translation by
computer-translation software.
B. It would mean an immense increase in the number of text-based documents
translated by machines.
C. It would mean the transition of small translation businesses to
large-scale corporations.
D. It would mean the end of translation as a profession for translators
working on an individual basis.