Timeline: Developments in Translation Technology

1966

European Coal and Steel Community

European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) developed and used a computer system to retrieve terms and their contexts from stored human translations by identifying those sentences whose lexical items most closely matched the lexical items of a sentence to be translated.

1971

German Federal Army (Krollmann)

Apart from several lexical databases this model also envisaged subsystems for storing and analysing text corpora and translation archives stored on magnetic tape.

1979

Peter Arthern

While Krollmann’s model only seemed to include the reuse of identical text fragments (today known as “exact matches”), Arthern suggests a system that can also retrieve from the reference material similar source language sentences and their translations (today known as “fuzzy matches”).

1980

ALPS Inc. (later ALPNET Corporation)

The notion of automatically retrieving “exact matches” was first implemented in the early 1980s by ALPS Inc. (later ALPNET Corporation) in a simple component called “Repetitions Processing” as part of the company’s commercial MT system called Translation Support System.

1984

TRADOS

TRAnslation and DOcumentation Software (Germany)

1984

STAR

Software Translation Artwork Recording (Switzerland)

1988

TED

Translation Editor including first Translation Memory (TRADOS)

1990

MultiTerm (DOS)

Terminology management software (TRADOS)

1991

Transit (DOS)

Including Terminology management software TermStar. (STAR)

1992

Translator's Workbench for DOS

Including Translation Memory, editor and MultiTerm for DOS. (TRADOS)

1992

IBM GERMANY

Translation Manager/2 (TM/2) launched in 1992 running under IBM's operating system OS/2.
Later on Windows version (3.1).
First system which included linguistic resources for 19 languages.

1992

SDL International (UK)

Language Service Provider; growing fast to become one of the world market leaders in translation and localisation industry by acquiring more and more smaller company.

1993

Windows (Win 3.1)

TRADOS switch to Windows platform

1993

ATRIL 93

First translation memory tool for Windows 3.1 launched in 1993 including interface for MS Word for Windows.

1994

Transit/TermStar 2.0

Switch to Windows (Win 3.1)

1996

ATRIL 96

This system re-design as 32-bit Windows software forming integrated translation environment including proprietary editor and terminology management module; Word interface dropped entirely.