(UFSM - 2001)Imagine it: Your plane touches down a

(UFSM - 2001)

Imagine it: Your plane touches down at Charles de Gaulle and you take out your ¹portable voice recognition-translation device. You set the dial to "Français." Et voilà! You are free 3to roam Paris without anyone sneering at your high school French. Sound like science fiction? ²Machines that recognize your voice and translate your language have already converged. Prototypes of real-time devices are in use, and they will probably be on the market in a decade or two. But before we shell out $299.99 for this shiny new gadget, let us pause to bid farewell to the dream of an idiomatic common ground - to the hope for mutual intelligibility and a linguistic brotherhood of man.

Lingua Franca, New York, May/June 2000.

Se o sujeito da oração "Machines (...) HAVE already CONVERGED" (ref. 2) estivesse no singular e fosse mantido o tempo do verbo, a forma verbal destacada