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Sammamish youth is a top translator

August 18, 2009

By Administrator

By Christopher Huber
Skyline High School graduate Daryl Hansen earned an honorable mention for his performance in the seventh annual International Olympiad of Theoretical, Mathematical and Applied Linguistics July 26-31 in Wroclaw, Poland.
He was one of eight high school students representing two teams for the United States. Eighty-six students from 17 countries competed at the event.
“I did alright,” he said. “I’m not regretful about what I did, but I didn’t do great.”
The students had practiced together online for weeks leading up to the late July competition, said Hansen’s father, Barry Hansen in an e-mail to the Review.
The event involved individual and group competition where students solved complex language translation problems. They were given a few key phrases in a language they don’t know which were translated into English. Using those phrases as a key, the students had to translate other phrases and passages in the foreign language.
The languages in each test problem included Sulka (an East Papuan language), Bamana (from Mali, Guinea and west Africa), Burmese and Nahuatl (from Aztec Mexico). The problems used languages not known to participants, so as to avoid giving anyone an advantage, Barry Hansen said.
The team test was in Vietnamese and lasted four hours July 28.
“The first time you see (the problem) you think it’s virtually impossible to do it,” Daryl Hansen said. “By the end of it you could read Vietnamese … it was still really cool to be able to read the sentence like you knew Vietnamese.”
Daryl made the national team after finishing in fourth place out of 135 at the third annual North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad March 11.
See the problems and final results at http://www.math.uni.wroc.pl/~msliw/lingw/iol/index.php?s=home.html.
Reporter Christopher Huber can be reached at 392-6434, ext. 242, or chuber@isspress.com. Comment on this story at www.sammamishreview.com.

Skyline High School graduate Daryl Hansen earned an honorable mention for his performance in the seventh annual International Olympiad of Theoretical, Mathematical and Applied Linguistics July 26-31 in Wroclaw, Poland.

He was one of eight high school students representing two teams for the United States. Eighty-six students from 17 countries competed at the event.  

“I did alright,” he said. “I’m not regretful about what I did, but I didn’t do great.”

The students had practiced together online for weeks leading up to the late July competition, said Hansen’s father, Barry Hansen in an e-mail to the Review.

The event involved individual and group competition where students solved complex language translation problems. They were given a few key phrases in a language they don’t know which were translated into English. Using those phrases as a key, the students had to translate other phrases and passages in the foreign language.

The languages in each test problem included Sulka (an East Papuan language), Bamana (from Mali, Guinea and west Africa), Burmese and Nahuatl (from Aztec Mexico). The problems used languages not known to participants, so as to avoid giving anyone an advantage, Barry Hansen said.

The team test was in Vietnamese and lasted four hours July 28.

“The first time you see (the problem) you think it’s virtually impossible to do it,” Daryl Hansen said. “By the end of it you could read Vietnamese … it was still really cool to be able to read the sentence like you knew Vietnamese.”

Daryl made the national team after finishing in fourth place out of 135 at the third annual North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad March 11.

See the problems and final results at http://www.math.uni.wroc.pl/~msliw/lingw/iol/index.php?s=home.html.

Reporter Christopher Huber can be reached at 392-6434, ext. 242, or chuber@isspress.com.

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