Computer programming course - 計算機程序設計課程

One Sunday, at one of our weekly salsa sessions, my friend Frank brought along a Danish guest. I knew Frank spoke Danish well, because his mother was Danish, and he had lived in Denmark as a child. As for his friend, her English was fluent, as is standard for Scandinavians. However, to my surprise, during the evening’s chitchat it emerged that the two friends habitually exchanged emails using Google Translate. Frank would write a message in English, then run it through Google Translate to produce a new text in Danish; conversely, she would write a message in Danish, then let Google Translate anglicize it. How odd! Why would two intelligent people, each of whom spoke the other’s language well, do this? My own experiences with machine-translation software had always led me to be highly skeptical of it. But my skepticism was clearly not shared by these two. Indeed, many thoughtful people are quite enamored of translation programs, finding little to criticize in them. This baffles me.

一個星期天，在我們每週一次的薩爾薩舞會上，我的朋友弗蘭克帶來了一位丹麥客人。我知道弗蘭克的丹麥語說得很好，因為他的母親是丹麥人，而且他小時候住在丹麥。至於他的朋友，她的英語很流利，這是斯堪的納維亞人的標準。然而，令我驚訝的是，在晚上的閒聊中，兩個朋友習慣性地使用谷歌翻譯來交換電子郵件。弗蘭克會用英語寫一條消息，然後通過谷歌翻譯運行它以生成丹麥語的新文本；相反，她會用丹麥語寫一條信息，然後讓谷歌翻譯將其英語化。多麼奇怪！為什麼兩個都說對方語言的聰明人會這樣做？我自己使用機器翻譯軟件的經歷一直讓我對它持高度懷疑態度。但我的懷疑顯然不是這兩個人一樣。確實，許多有思想的人都非常喜歡翻譯程序，發現其中沒有什麼可批評的。這讓我很困惑。