Is the era of artificial speech translation upon us?: reading answers and analysis
A journalist talks to translation researcher Alex Waibel and earpiece maker Waverly Labs about how close we are to a real-life Babel fish. Lectures and hotel check-ins already work, but a true system has to handle noise, translate simultaneously, work offline and respect etiquette. The writer's conclusion: machines will never replace sharing a language.
Questions 27-40 · 14 marks · 3 question blocks
Where the answers sit
The multiple choice (27-30) covers the first five paragraphs in order. The sentence endings (31-34) take paragraphs six and seven. YES / NO / NOT GIVEN (35-40) covers the last two paragraphs.
Questions 27-30
These ask what the writer implies, so read the whole paragraph, not one line. In the opening, both people are struggling (noise, a bad line, distance) even though they share a language. In the Babel fish paragraph, the device is a dream that technology eventually delivers, so its arrival isn't surprising.
| Question | Answer | Also accepted |
|---|---|---|
| 27 | D | — |
| 28 | A | — |
| 29 | C | — |
| 30 | B | — |
Questions 31-34
Two endings are grammatically possible for most stems, so check the meaning. Japan has many systems but 'a long way to go'. TV voiceover works because it runs simultaneously. Etiquette-aware translators could protect local customs because they don't need to copy international English habits.
| Question | Answer | Also accepted |
|---|---|---|
| 31 | C | — |
| 32 | E | — |
| 33 | F | — |
| 34 | B | — |
Questions 35-40
The two NOs contradict the text directly: professionals won't hand language awareness over to software, and translation could help migrant families rather than harm them. The NOT GIVENs take a real detail (lip movements, English replacing Latin) and add a claim the writer never makes.
| Question | Answer | Also accepted |
|---|---|---|
| 35 | NO | — |
| 36 | YES | — |
| 37 | NO | — |
| 38 | NOT GIVEN | — |
| 39 | NOT GIVEN | — |
| 40 | YES | — |
The questions most people get wrong
A tempts, but the writer and Waibel are speaking the same language, English. The point is that both find parts of the call hard, so D.
B. When the writer says the reluctance to share an earpiece with a stranger can't have been totally unexpected, he means it is understandable.
NOT GIVEN. Scientists use English where their predecessors used Latin, but nothing is said about which is easier to translate.
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