the lord's prayer

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After reading the English version of The Lord's Prayer, try this comprehension activity and some writing yourself.

English Version

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name;
Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us our daily bread;
And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Amen.

Now try reading a version of the prayer in Hawai'i Creole English, the language that is spoken by half of the population in that state of the USA. Then check your understanding by doing the following comprehension activity.

Machine Translation

See what happens if you use a machine translator to translate a text from one language to another. We used Altavista's Babel Fish, and used the following procedure. We translated the text from English to Chinese. Then we translated the Chinese version that the machine gave us back into English. Then we repeated the process twice more. Here are the results:

English-Chinese-English

Our father, the thy name is art in the heaven, the respect; The thy kingdom comes; thy will do on the Earth according to the original design in the heaven. For us our daily bread; And forgives our our illegal invasion, when we forgive these invasions oppose us. And leads us is not enters the enticement, but pays us from the evil. Amen.

English-Chinese-English-Chinese-English

Our father, this thy name is art in the heaven, the respect; This thy kingdom comes; The thy will does on the Earth acts according to the primitive design in the heaven. For our ours daily bread; And forgives our our illegal invasion, when we forgive these invasions oppose us. And leads us is not enters this kind of enticement, but pays us from this kind of evil. Amen.

English-Chinese-English-Chinese-English-Chinese-English

Our father, this thy name is art in the heaven, the respect; This thy kingdom comes; This thy will does in Earth moves the basis primitive design in the heaven. For our ours daily bread; And forgives our our illegal invasion, when we forgive these invasions oppose us. And leads us is not inputs this kind of enticement, but pays us from this kind of evil. Amen.

Notice how the translation gets more and more inaccurate. This is because machines do not have "communicative competence", like people do. This means that we use our knowledge of language and the world around us to infer the meanings of things that are not immediately obvious or transparent. The machine takes one word at a time and translates it literally from one language to the other. It does not take the words in context, as a person would.

Your turn

Take any well-known English text. Translate it into your own language (if available) in Babel Fish or another Machine Translator. Then back into English. Repeat as many times as we did for the Lord's Prayer. Send us the final text and see if other learners can guess what the original text was.

Do you think machine translation can ever work in a satisfactory way? Why? Why not? Send us your opinion.

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