This week
- Lecture
- 10 May 2027 The seam closes
- Slides
- Open the deck
- Due
- Specimen log 14 May 2027
Bench
- Material
- fluent output
- Operation
- reconstructing, and failing
- Leaves
- the exact sentence where the method stops working
Everything you have learned works on a broken surface. Today the surface is smooth.
The exercise
Take a translation produced by a current general-purpose model. It will read well. Somewhere in it, something is wrong — a name, a register, a claim the source did not make.
Now do what you did in week 2: reconstruct the mechanism from the output.
What will happen
You will get further than you expect on the content and nowhere at all on the mechanism. A wrong word in a lookup implicates an entry. A wrong claim in a fluent paragraph implicates nothing you can point at.
Write down the exact point where the method stops working. That sentence is the most valuable thing you will produce this semester, and it is the one the lecture is about.
Afterwards
The specimen log closes this Friday. It should end where this bench does.
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- you have attempted a reconstruction from fluent output and written down where it failed
- you can say what evidence you would have needed
- you can say whether that evidence exists anywhere you could reach
Teaching team
- Ines Barrantes — convenor
- Aurel Marchetti — tutor