Translation

The history of the machine translation

By cancasmo11

  • The beginning

    The beginning
    In the mid-1930s the first patents for "translating machines" were applied for by Georges Artsrouni, for an automatic bilingual dictionary using paper tape. Russian Peter Troyanskii submitted a more detailed proposal that included both the bilingual dictionary and a method for dealing with grammatical roles between languages, based on the grammatical system of Esperanto.
  • Period: to

    History of translation

    Machine translation is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another.

  • The early years

    The early years
    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.

  • A few years later

    A few years later
    On 7 January 1954 the Georgetown-IBM experiment was held in New York at the head office of IBM. This was the first public demonstration of a machine translation system. The demonstration was widely reported in the newspapers and garnered public interest. The system itself, however, was no more than a "toy" system. It had only 250 words and translated 49 carefully selected Russian sentences into English

  • The 1960s, the ALPAC report and the seventies

    The 1960s, the ALPAC report and the seventies
    Research in the 1960s in both the Soviet Union and the United States concentrated mainly on the Russian-English language pair. The objects of translation were chiefly scientific and technical documents, such as articles from scientific journals. The rough translations produced were sufficient to get a basic understanding of the articles. If an article discussed a subject deemed to be confidential, it was sent to a human translator for a complete translation; if not, it was discarded.

  • The 1980s and early 1990s

    The 1980s and early 1990s
    By the 1980s, both the diversity and the number of installed systems for machine translation had increased. A number of systems relying on mainframe technology were in use, such as Systran, Logos, Ariane-G5, and Metal. As a result of the improved availability of microcomputers, there was a market for lower-end machine translation systems. Many companies took advantage of this in Europe, Japan, and the USA.

  • 2000s

    2000s
    The field of machine translation has seen major changes in the last few years. Currently a large amount of research is being done into statistical machine translation and example-based machine translation. In the area of speech translation, research has focused on moving from domain-limited systems to domain-unlimited translation systems.