(a)
立法中的谋私，是比寻租更安全、更隐蔽、利润更大、危害性也更大的“设租”，而设租与寻租结合起来，将出现权力—金钱—更大权力—更多金钱的恶性循环。最近，越来越多的事实证明，立法腐败作为中国社会新的“潜问题”已经日益凸显出来。(b)
In legislation seeking private gain, is safely, more covert seeks, the profit is bigger than, the hazardous nature also in a big way “supposes rents,”but supposes rents with seeks unifies, will appear authority一money一bigger authority一more moneys the vicious circle. Recently, more and more many facts proved that, the legislation corrupt new “dived as the Chinese society the question” already day by day 凸显.(c)
“Rent-setting,” seeking private gain through legislation, is safer and more covert, more profitable but also riskier than “rent-seeking,” while a combination of rent- setting and -seeking will set up a vicious circle of power -> money -> greater power -> more money. Of late, more and more facts confirm that the new “latent problem” of legislative corruption is becoming more manifest by the day in Chinese society.
Source: “Legislative corruption is yet another new ‘latent problem’ in Chinese society,” Lianhe zaobao, 19 May 2005Clearly, you still have to go down to the fine details of the text to grasp the text and be sure of accuracy. So why bother? The answer comes in three parts.
(1) Simple labour saving, to edit an already keyed text rather than key it in, then edit...
(2) the Chinese written word is such a fascinating medium. With society in a vortex of complex, interlinked changes, and with writers, despite the obvious limitations and risks, writing fascinating analyses, all to a huge degree seductively available on the Internet 24/7, the appetite for texts of us onlookers expands grotesquely, especially those with magpie minds - we'll name no names. Chinese script is (generally) read much more slowly by non-native than native users; at our rate we'll never catch up with a fraction even of what we manage to collect and catalog. Well, that may not always be the case, but you see my point.
The third part is that Babelfish is a basic vanilla-flavoured, promotional version of the Systrans engine. Here in Singapore it was easy to find the executable version on CD-ROM , install it and begin teaching it current jargon (indeed, a coinage by the looks of it) like “rent-setting” for shezu. As you build a set of Custom Dictionaries, the raw output quickly starts to shape up. Furthermore the Systrans product will hopefully clean up its act soon, so that 凸显[-顯] tūxiǎn v. give prominence to; magnify is included in the standard dictionary, etc. Sometimes the first pass on a text string will parse the proper nouns correctly, while pass two glosses them ( Zhou Enlai gets glossed to circle kindness comes), depending how the babelfish is feeling; there are still patches of Japanese output that hint that the Chinese version was ported over late in the game; and many mispellings which point to a hasty outsourcing operation.
The current performance may well improve if more AI techniques were applied, to give better parsing and semantic databasing. The investment necessary to attempt this seems likely to be made, given that overcoming the Chinese/English linguistic divide has become so important commercially and geopolitically.
Of course there are inherent limitations. To an extent even greater than English, Chinese grammar relies on the listener's intuitive grasp of context rather than explicit grammatical markers, and des parodies doivent toujours être prévues même avec le linguistique tracé par bien plus ancien se divise: Anglais/Français, par exemple.
But having done plenty of translation and translation editing/polishing in the past several years, I've paid my dues and will use any labour-saving tool—expecially if it promises to improve.
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