Machine translation history

By pancho521

  • The beginning

    The first set of proposals for computer based machine translation was presented in 1949 by Warren Weaver, a researcher at the Rockefeller Foundation, "Translation memorandum". These proposals were based on information theory, successes in code breaking during the Second World War, and theories about the universal principles underlying natural language.

  • First publication

    First public demo of computer translation at Georgetown University: 49 Russian sentences are translated into English using a 250-word vocabulary and 6 grammar rules.

  • The race for machine translation

    The vain struggles to improve machine translation lasted for forty years. In 1966, the US ALPAC committee, in its famous report, called machine translation expensive, inaccurate, and unpromising. They instead recommended focusing on dictionary development, which eliminated US researchers from the race for almost a decade.

  • Rule-based machine translation (RBMT)

    The first ideas surrounding rule-based machine translation appeared in the 70s. The scientists peered over the interpreters’ work, trying to compel the tremendously sluggish computers to repeat those actions.

  • Transfer approach to machine translation

    Research focussed more on the transfer approach. In this architecture, the source text is analysed by a source language dictionary and converted into an abstract form. This form is translated to an abstract form of the target text via a bilingual dictionary and then converted into a target text using a target language dictionary.

  • Computer-Aided Translations for Everyone

    Rule-based translation started being used outside the military in the 1990s. Thanks to the rise of the internet, the need for international communication increased at an unprecedented rate.
    Global brands suddenly faced the challenge of distributing and marketing products in many target areas and needed a quick way to accelerate translation efforts.In 1992, the first public machine translation service was created. It was a translation of an online forum from English to German.

  • Modern days

    Due to the creation of the Internet and all the opportunity it offered, Franz-Josef Och won a machine translation speed competition in 2003 and would become head of Translation Development at Google.

  • Google

    Google informed the public in 2016 that the implementation of a neural network approach improved clarity across Google Translate, eliminating much of its clumsiness. They called it the Google Neural Machine Translation (NMT) system. The system began translating language pairings that it had not been taught. The programmers taught the system English and Portuguese and also English to Spanish.