Articles for Translators
and Translation Companies
Machine Translation
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Переводчики диктуют
Если сравнивать, с чисто технической точки зрения, письменный перевод с переводом устным, то основное их отличие — это СКОРОСТЬ. Устная речь производит около 3000 слов в час, и это естественный процесс…
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Advice
to freelance translators on MT post-editing projects
MT post-editing projects can be divided into two main categories,
depending on the expected level of quality of the final output…
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the full article…
Human
Translation vs. Machine Translation: Rise of the Machines
Different approaches to automatic evaluation of machine translation
(MT) quality are considered. We describe several methods for automatic
evaluation of MT, such as methods based on string matching and n-gram
models. The candidate translations done by Google and PROMPT are
compared with the reference translation by an automatic translation
evaluation program and the results of the evaluation are presented…
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the full article…
Free
Online Translators: A Comparative Assessment of www.worldlingo.com,
www.freetranslation.com, and www.translate.google.com
The present article focuses on three free online translation packages—www.worldlingo.com,
www.freetranslation.com, and www.translate.google.com —and asks
the following: If the objective of anglophone users is to understand
the meaning of a given source text (ST), which of these packages
would he/she be best advised to use? Taking a text of approximately
200 words from the European Commission’s website, this article asks
each of its chosen packages to translate the ST from three source
languages (SLs) into English…
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the full article…
Olympic
Targets
Eight years and two Olympic Games ago, I wrote an article titled
" Tapping Into the Olympic Spirit: The Pillars of Translation."
Inspired by the classical columns of the Greek Olympic hosts, I
tried to narrow down the four pillars of translation that give us
the required balance in our everyday lives as translators…
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the full article…
Compatibility
of Languages and Other Restrictions in the Statistical Translation
by Google Translate
Sometimes we wonder whether machines can replace humans in a particular
area. The development of information technologies enables that fewer
calculations have to be performed manually, computers take over
some of the tasks completely and thereby do not require human control.
In the field of machine translation, programs mostly serve as a
tool for professionals, machine production here still needs improvement...
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the full article...
С родного на чужой и обратно: тестируем 7 онлайн-переводчиков
Выбор онлайн-переводчика – дело ответственное и неочевидное. Известно, что различные сервисы предоставляют неодинаковое качество перевода, более того – это качество у одного и того же сервиса разнится в зависимости от выбранной языковой пары. Как не ошибиться в выборе и получить наилучший результат для нужного языка?...
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the full article...
Milengo leverages Google Translator
Toolkit with Google Adwords
Last month when Milengo announced they had been selected by Google
as an official localization vendor to help open translation accessibility
to millions of users globally we contacted Adam Blau, Rebellion
Leader at Milengo, for comment...
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the full article...
Language Resources for Translation
in Multilingual Question Answering Systems
In the field of Information Retrieval monolingual and multilingual
tools are being created that can greatly assist specialists in their
work; as well as helping other users find a wide variety of information.
Multilingual tools are evolving but several years of study and research
are still needed to improve implementations. One of the main difficulties
facing these tools is the task of translating queries made by users
and the documentary sources found in response (Diekema, 2003)...
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the full article...
Совместимость
языков и другие ограничения в статистическом переводе Google Translate
Порой мы задаемся вопросом, может
ли машина заменить человека в определенной сфере. Развитие информационных
технологий приводит к тому, что все меньше расчетов нужно проводить
вручную, а некоторые задачи компьютер может взять на себя полностью
и не требует контроля человека...
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the full article…
More
Reflections of a Human Translator on Machine Translation in The
Field of Patent Translation
Eleven years ago I wrote an article
for the Translation Journal titled "Reflections of a Human
Translator on Machine Translation." The subtitle of the article
was "Will MT Become the 'Deus Ex Machina' Rendering Humans
Obsolete in an Age When Deus Est Machina? A lot has changed since
I wrote that article. Computers have become much smaller and much
more powerful...
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the full article…
Overcoming
the Digital Divide through Machine Translation
The digital divide is the gap between
those with regular; effective access to digital technologies, in
particular the Internet, and those without. Researchers have quoted
many factors responsible for the digital divide, including: low
internet access, low literacy rate, geographical locations, economic
conditions, and language barrier. Efforts are being made to provide
Internet access by expanding the internet cafés for public use.
Communication costs have dropped and many other negative factors
have been eliminated or alleviated...
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the full article…
An
Analysis of Google Translate Accuracy
Although not appropriate for all
situations, machine translation (MT) is now being used by many translators
to aid their work. Many others use MT to get a quick grasp of foreign
text from email, Web pages, or other computer-based material which
they would not otherwise understand. Free, Web-based MT services
are available to assist with this task, but relatively few studies
have analyzed their accuracies. In particular, to our knowledge,
there has been no comprehensive analysis of how well Google Translate
(GT) performs...
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the full article…
Traducción
automática y software libre en la formación de traductores
After an analysis of the technological
training of translation students, machine translation is described
and compared with human translation. Then, the professional situations
for which this kind of translation is useful are considered. After
enumerating the types of machine translation, some examples of free
machine translation systems are listed. The final conclusion is
that machine translation has achieved acceptable quality levels
and can be useful for professional translators working with certain
types of texts and also for Translation teachers and students...
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the full article…
Lionbridge
Partners with IBM for Real-Time Multilingual Solutions (Interview
with Satish Maripuri, COO of Lionbridge)
On April 22nd Lionbridge and IBM
announced their strategic agreement to accelerate the development
and commercialization of a SaaS-based, Real-Time Translation Automation
solution for the Commercial Markets. We interviewed Lionbridge COO,
Satish Maripuri to find out more about the announcement...
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the full article…
Interview
with Olga Beregovaya, CEO of PROMT Americas (Machine Translation
Solutions Supplier)
PROMT is an established name in machine
translation and is now becoming a solid player in enterprise automated
translation solutions. The company has a unique offering targeting
the professional translation community, both in-house localization
departments and translation agencies...
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the full article…
A
Prototype System For Machine Interpretation
Effective machine interpretation
(MI) or computer-assisted interpretation (CAI) is now a reality.
However, most MI systems are capable of supporting only a few languages.
This paper describes a new, portable prototype that is capable of
recognizing unlimited vocabulary in 6 different languages, translating
between any two of 51, and generating speech in 21. A test of spoken
English to Korean shows that although there were several errors
during the speech recognition and translation phases, the resulting
speech was still acceptable...
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the full article…
Will
Human Translators Be Here Tomorrow?
Any product or service, including
translations, can be defined in terms of three parameters: cost,
delivery time, and quality. All machine translation systems offer
unbeatable speed and very low prices, principally if you are going
to deal with high volumes. Web-based systems are free, at least
for the time being...
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the full article…
Hostile
Takeover? Welcome Addition? Machine Translation Enters the World
of the Translator
It's been an interesting phenomenon.
Professional translators seem to loathe and fear machine translation
as much as they ever have - or, because of MT's slow but steady
encroaching into "our" territory, more than ever - but
translation environment tools [TEnTs] left and right are including
machine translation components into their workflow...
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the full article…
The
Efficacy of Round-trip Translation for MT Evaluation
Round-trip translation (RTT), otherwise
known as reverse translation or back-and-forth translation, involves
the translation of text from one language to another (the forward
translation or FT) and back again (the back translation or BT),
e.g., a paragraph written in English can be translated to Spanish,
and then, the resulting Spanish text can be translated back to English
again. RTT has been used in several previous studies (e.g., Glidden-Tracey
& Greenwood, 1997; Klaudy, 1996)...
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the full article…
Automatic
Web Translators as Part of a Multilingual Question-Answering (QA)
System: Translation of Questions
The traditional model of information
retrieval entails some implicit restrictions, including: a) the
assumption that users search for documents, not answers; and that
the documents per se will respond to and satisfy the query, and
b) the assumption that the queries and the document that will satisfy
the particular informational need are written in the same language.
However, many times users will need specific data in response to
the queries put forth...
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the full article…
Machine
translation: integrating automation into an effective localization
strategy
As the pace of globalization increases,
companies are faced with new challenges including staying ahead
of the competition by reaching global markets faster, communicating
with global customers in multiple languages, and the increasing
cost and complexity of doing business on a global scale...
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the full article…
Automatic
Translation in Multilingual Electronic Meetings
Electronic meetings, e.g., chat rooms and bulletin boards, can be more
efficient and effective than traditional, oral discussions, but
until only recently, online groups speaking many languages could
not benefit from machine translation (MT). Although it is possible
for linguists to provide translations for the group members as they
read comments during a multilingual discussion, this is not feasible
for large groups and many languages...
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the full article…
The
Language Software Revolution
The continued expansion of the global market, and the realization that
English may have already reached its zenith as the global internet
language, requires transnational corporations to utilize multilingual
means of reaching new markets. In the process of accessing new audiences
for their products, transnational corporations must ensure that
the messages in marketing ads are grammatically and culturally correct...
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the full article…
The
possibility of language: a discussion of the nature of language,
with implications for human and machine translation
L’heure de vérité a sonné, Melby en est conscient.
Les résultats de plusieurs années de recherche sont
convaincants. Pour le moment, la substitution définitive
du traducteur par la machine est irréalisable et celle de
la traduction humaine par la traduction automatique de haute qualité
reste ponctuelle...
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the full article…
Machine
Translation Used by the US Government
This time, we look at the "parallel
universe" of government translation work and how machine translation
and some variants are employed there. Many of the new developments
reported in this series came from the AMTA (Association for Machine
Translation in the Americas) conference held October 21-25, 2008
in Hawaii...
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the full article…
Machine
Translation: Ingredients for Productive and Stable MT deployments
- Part 2
Before we dive into current trends in Machine Translation research,
I'd like to clarify the part of the translation problem that is
usually addressed by MT research - the fully-automated translation
of digitized text sentences from one language to another. Processes
or "software solutions" that incorporate MT may involve other research-worthy
steps just to get the input into digitized text form…
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the full article…
Machine
Translation: Ingredients for Productive and Stable MT deployments
- Part 1
This is the first of three planned articles reporting on Machine
Translation industry developments that emerged at the AMTA (Association
for Machine Translation in the Americas) conference held in Honolulu,
Hawaii, October 21-25, 2008. AMTA conferences are held every other
year, and have the goal of bringing together users, developers and
researchers on MT…
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the full article…
Transfer-based
machine translation
Transfer-based machine translation
is a type of machine translation, it is based on the idea of interlingua
and is currently one of the most widely used methods of machine
translation...
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the full article…
Comparison of machine translation applications
Basic general information for popular
Machine translation applications - Name; Official Website; Platform;
License; Price; Latest stable release...
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the full article…
List of research laboratories for machine
translation
The following is a list of research
laboratories that focus on machine translation - Corporate Labs;
Government Labs; University Labs...
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the full article…
Evaluation of machine translation
Various methods for the evaluation
for machine translation have been employed. This article will focus
on the evaluation of the output of machine translation, rather than
on performance or usability evaluation. Before covering the large
scale studies, a brief comment will be made on one of the more pervasive
evaluation techniques, that of round-trip translation (or "back
translation")...
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the full article…
Interlingual machine translation
Interlingual machine translation
is one of the classic approaches to machine translation. In this
approach, the source language, i.e. the text to be translated is
transformed into an interlingua, i.e., an abstract language-independent
representation. The target language is then generated from the interlingua.
Within the rule-based machine translation paradigm, the interlingual
approach is an alternative to the direct approach and the transfer
approach...
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the full article…
Example-based machine translation
The Example-based machine translation
(EBMT) approach to machine translation is often characterized by
its use of a bilingual corpus with parallel texts as its main knowledge
base, at run-time. It is essentially a translation by analogy and
can be viewed as an implementation of case-based reasoning approach
of machine learning...
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the full article…
Statistical machine translation
Statistical machine translation (SMT)
is a machine translation paradigm where translations are generated
on the basis of statistical models whose parameters are derived
from the analysis of bilingual text corpora. The statistical approach
contrasts with the rule-based approaches to machine translation
as well as with example-based machine translation. The first
ideas of statistical machine translation were introduced by Warren
Weaver in 1949, including the ideas of applying Claude Shannon's
information theory...
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the full article…
Making Machine Translation Easier:
Using Language Software to Identify GUI Strings
In the
last three decades, major companies have attempted to improve the
comprehensibility of their technical publications by implementing
various types of Controlled Language (CL). A CL places particular
restraints on lexicon, grammar, and style to improve the clarity,
consistency, and translatability of texts…
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the full article…
Dispelling the myths of machine translation
It is not surprising that myths,
half-truths, and misunderstandings abound regarding machine translation:
It seems as if the experience most players in the translation field
have with this technology does not go beyond toying a little with
one of the free online translation tools. In the hope of setting
the record straight, here is a closer look at some of the most common
myths about machine translation...
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the full article…
Wikipedia about machine translation
Machine translation, sometimes referred
to by the abbreviation MT, is a sub-field of computational linguistics
that investigates the use of computer software to translate text
or speech from one natural language to another. At its basic level,
MT performs simple substitution of words in one natural language
for words in another. Using corpus techniques, more complex translations
may be attempted, allowing for better handling of differences in
linguistic typology...
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the full article…
The Rise of the Machine! (Machine Translation,
that is)
One of the original anticipated uses
of computers was machine translation. By Machine Translation (MT),
we mean the automation of the translation process. As early as the
1950’s a primitive experiment of translating sixty Russian sentences
into English was deemed a success and resulted in a period of significant
funding for research which through various ebbs and flows continues
to this day…
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the full article…
Is
machine translation a choice?
When a translator works upon a translation, a complex series of
operations belies the ostensibly simple process that is taking place.
It has long been the goal of computational linguists to achieve
fully automatic high quality machine translation, but to date that
goal is some way off, nevertheless, with the means at our disposal
today, is machine translation a viable choice?…
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the full article…
Machine Translation Vs Human Translation
Much have been said about translation
as being one of the most effective, if not the only, means of communication
especially among cultures of different languages. Translation as
a concept has existed hundred years ago, but it is only during the
second half of the twentieth century that it emerged as an independent
academic discipline called Translation Studies and taught at universities…
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the full article…
Interlingual
Machine Translation: Prospects and Setbacks
This study, in an attempt to rise above the intricacy of 'being
informed on the verge of globalization,' is founded on the premise
that Machine Translation (MT) applications searching for an ideal
key to find a universal foundation for all natural languages have
a restricted say over the translation process at various discourse
levels. Our paper favors not judging against the superiority of
human translation vs. machine translation or automated translation
in non-English speaking settings…
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the full article…
Statistical
Machine Translation and Translation Memory: an Integration Made
in Heaven
High quality machine translation (MT) of human languages has been
a quest for more than five decades. Almost as soon as computers
were invented, developers and business people could imagine the
solutions automated translation would provide in supporting international
business, aiding communications, and furthering collaboration in
the medical and research communities…
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the full article...
Machine
Translation (MT) - the 80% Solution?
In 2000 LISA Director Michael Anobile and then Newsletter Editor
Deborah Fry spoke with Tom Lueck, CEO of veteran machine translation
company Logos, about machine translation, the Internet and the future
of the language technology market. We are running this article from
the 2000 Archives to allow readers to decide what progress, and
how much, has been made during the last three years in the field
of MT …
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the full article…
The development and use of machine translation systems and computer-based
translation tools
This survey of the present demand and use of computer-based translation
software concentrates on systems designed for the production of
translations of publishable quality, including developments in controlled
language systems, translator workstations, and localisation; but
it covers also the developments of software for non-translators,
in particular for use with Web pages and other Internet applications,
and it looks at future needs and systems under development. The
final section compares the types of translations that can be met
most appropriately by human and by machine (and computer-aided)
translation respectively …
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the full article…
Machine
translation and human translation: in competition or in complementation?
Ever since the idea of using computers to translate natural languages
was first proposed in the 1940s and since the first investigations
were begun in the 1950s, translators have watched developments either
in scorn or in trepidation. Either they have dismissed the very
notion that anyone could even believe that translation could be
mechanized, or (at the other extreme) they have feared that their
profession would be taken over entirely by machines …
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the full article…
Towards a new vision for MT (Machine translation)
The MT Summit series of conferences began nearly fifteen years ago,
in 1987 at Hakone, Japan. Much has changed in the field of MT since
then. Many of the methods, systems and techniques that are familiar
to us today have emerged in the last fifteen years. For example,
in the late 1980s there were no example-based MT systems, no statistics-based
methods, there were no translation memories, there was no text alignment,
there was no localization industry …
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the full article…
Machine translation today and tomorrow
The field of machine translation (MT) was the pioneer research area
in computational linguistics during the 1950s and 1960s. When it
began, the assumed goal was the automatic translation of all kinds
of documents at a quality equalling that of the best human translators.
It became apparent very soon that this goal was impossible in the
foreseeable future …
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the full article…
MT
and Language: Conflicting Technologies?
In a previous piece (Where Do Translators Fit Into Machine Translation?),
I sought to direct a variety of philosophical, linguistic, and practical
questions to members of the MT community during one of their major
international conferences. Since response to these questions has
been less than deafening, I would now like to suggest a few possible
answers and speculations of my own concerning these matters …
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the full article…
Where Do Translators Fit into Machine Translation?
Here are the original questions for this panel as submitted to the
speakers:
1. At the last MT (Machine Translation) Summit, Martin Kay stated
that there should be "greater attention to empirical studies of
translation so that computational linguists will have a better idea
of what really goes on in translation and develop tools that will
be more useful for the end user." Does this mean that there has
been insufficient input into MT processes by translators interested
in MT? …
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the full article…
Two
German Books About Machine Translation
These slick, green paperbacks could not be more business-like in
their appearance. They are clearly serious books intended to deal
with serious issues. And their twenty assembled authors carry out
this intent in an uncompromising fashion without a hint of the history
behind their subject. And herein perhaps lies the chief fault in
these competent but circumscribed volumes …
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the full article…
Machine
Translation
"Automatic translation" or "machine translation" systems have been
available for a number of years. The underlying assumption is that
a computer can translate as well as a human translator.
We have recently tried out two machine translation systems available
on the internet. We tested their ability to translate two short
texts: one financial, the other legal…
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the full article…
Machine
Translation: Ingredients for Productive and Stable MT deployments
- Part 3
This is the final part of the first in a new series of articles
on how to achieve successful deployments of machine translation
in various use cases. Different types of source documents and different
uses for the translations lead to varying approaches to automation.
In the first part of this article, we talked about why it is so
important to automate translation of knowledge bases…
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the full article…
Machine Translation and Computer-Assisted
Translation: a New Way of Translating?
This paper begins with a brief
analysis of the importance of translation technology in different
spheres of modern life, followed by a concise history of machine
and computer-assisted translation. It then describes the technology
available to translators in this first decade of the twenty-first
century and examines the negative and positive aspects of machine
translation and of the main tools used in computer-assisted translation:
electronic dictionaries, glossaries, terminology databases, concordances,
on-line bilingual texts and translation memories. Finally the paper
considers the impact of these new technologies on the professional
translator, concluding that s/he will need to acquire new skills
in order to remain efficient and competitive in the field.
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The
Interpretive Model and Machine Translation
For a long time,
translation formed part of linguistic studies (see G. MOUNINs works).
However, during the last few decades, it has been institutionally
associated with Language Sciences, which represent a vast and very
dynamic field in which interdisciplinarity plays a key role. This
association has led to the burgeoning of a translation science (traductology
or translation studies) within the field of Language Sciences which
does not deal specifically with translation but with translation
operations and process, thus reflecting the change in perspective
adopted to approach the study object. Our aim is to put forward
an epistemological analytical grid of the field in question i.e.
the works related to the analytical study of translation and its
natural processing as a prelude to machine translation or computer-assisted
translation. However, delimiting a field requires one or several
perspectives in order to define its axes, issues, methods and aims…
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