問題詳情

V. Reading Comprehension A.The UK education system is failing to produce enough students with foreign language skills, an indispensable tool for thestudy of history. Research published in June this year by the Confederation of British Industry revealed that one in five schoolsin England had a persistently low take-up of languages, after what the government is describing as “a decade of damagingdecline.” This slump has taken its toll on the university system. In the past 15 years more than a third of UK universitiesstopped offering specialist modern European language degrees, arguing that rigorous marking at A-level had deterred teenagersfrom studying languages at school.   The same period of time has witnessed the “rise of the machine translators.” In 2006 Google launched its pioneering“Google Translate” service, offering instant on-screen translations between English and Modern Standard Arabic. TodayGoogle offers translation services in and out of more than 70 languages, meeting the needs of the monolingual studentgeneration with ever increasing efficiency and popularity. However, the one-dimensionality of machine translation restricts theresponse of the on-screen polyglot to a singular, literal definition of each word or phrase. Mistranslations across the widestcultural gulfs abound.    The problem lies in the machine’s inability to consider the cultural context that gives each word its meaning. The Frenchidiom se taper le cul par terre, for example, is understood by every Francophone as “to laugh heartily” and has little to do withthe literal definition offered by Google – “ass banging on the floor.” The dangers inherent in this acultural approach to foreignsource material did not begin with the invention of the robotic interpreter. Some of history’s most ambitious translation projectshave failed just as miserably to notice or bridge the cultural gap between what is said and what is meant.   The Christian preoccupation with Muslim belief, which became obsessive during the Crusades, resulted in the firstEuropean attempts to make sense of the Quran. Arabic-to-Latin translation services were in no short supply. Centuries of Arabastronomy and mathematics had made Arabic-Latin bilingualism a matter of scientific necessity. Yet, whether out of ignoranceor hostility, these early Christian translations were often woefully devoid of cultural understanding. In this most nuanced ofsubject areas, a singular or literal interpretation is often the most damaging or damning. The first western attempts to makesense of this notoriously complex source, therefore, offer some valuable lessons to the upcoming Google Translate generation.
32. How many UK universities stopped offering degrees in French, German, Italian and Spanish since the turn of the century?
(A) less than 25%
(B) about 35%
(C) more than 45%
(D) Not mentioned.

參考答案

答案：B
難度：適中0.5
統計：A(0),B(0),C(0),D(0),E(0)

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