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Article Summary
Instructions:
Hi, you just need to summarize a article from a website. There are two resources you need to read before writing article and a PDF. You need to read the whole article and the FIRST chapter of the PDF. The instruction my professor gave me is down below.
Read Douglas Hofstadter’s recent Atlantic magazine article on Machine Translation and summarize it using your own language in 1000 words. There are three languages that the author picks as case studies – French, German, and Mandarin. Pick one of them and discuss the issues that arise in translating this language. If you have reading competency in another language, you could conduct experiments similar to the ones Hofstadter conducts on your language of choice and report the results.
Article Summary
Keep in mind that the article is long and 1000 words is not a lot. So your first task is to identify what you think the important ideas are in this article and then decide how to summarize them. The goal of the project is to summarize — so you’ll largely be reporting the views of the author. But towards the end you can give your personal take of the discussion as long as you make it clear that this is your viewpoint. Also note that while you summarizing someone else’s ideas, you still have to do it in your words. You cannot directly take chunks of text from the article. That would count as plagiarism.
Here’s the structure your essay should have:
Article Summary
1. Short introductory paragraph
2. Discussion of issues that arise in translating your language of choice
[this could be more than one paragraph]
3. Discussion of why Google Translate is limited in the way it is
[this could be more than one paragraph]
The final paragraph should wrap things up.
To get some tips on how to write well, you could read the first few chapters of Steven Pinker’s book “The Sense of Style”. They are attached below.
We will grade you on content and on style. Use spell checkers and avoid spelling mistakes
