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Georges Artsrouni patents a general-purpose device with many potential applications in France. He seems to have been working on the device since 1929.
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Peter Petrovich Troyanskii is awarded an author's certificate (patent) for a proposal to use a mechanized dictionary for translation between languages
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Troyanskii approaches the Academy of Sciences in Russia with his proposal for machine translation, seeking to work with linguists. Discussions continue till 1944, but not much comes out of it.
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Warren Weaver
working for the Rockefeller Foundation in the United States, puts forward a proposal for machine translation based on information theory, successes of code breaking during the second world war and speculation about universal underlying principles of natural language. -
The first known machine translation proposal was made in Estonia and involved a typewriter-translator.
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The Georgetown-IBM experiment
eld at the IBM head office in New York City in the United States, offers the first public demonstration of machine translation. The system itself, however, is no more than what today would be called a "toy" system, having just 250 words and translating just 49 carefully selected Russian sentences into English — mainly in the field of chemistry. Nevertheless, it encourages the view that machine translation was imminent -
In 1958, linguist Yehoshua Bar-Hillel travels around the world visiting machine translation centers
to better understand the work they were doing. In 1959, he writes up a report (intended primarily for the US government) pointing out some key difficulties with machine translation that he believed might doom the efforts then underway. An expanded version of the report is published in 1960 in the annual review journal Advances in Computers. -
ALPAC publishes a report commissioned by the United States government.
he report concludes that machine translation is more expensive, less accurate and slower than human translation, and that despite the expenses, machine translation is not likely to reach the quality of a human translator in the near future. It recommends that tools be developed to aid translators — automatic dictionaries, for example — and that some research in computational linguistics should continue to be supported. -
SYSTRAN is started by Peter Toma
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Logos is started by Bernard Scott.
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The METEO System,
developed at the Université de Montréal, is installed in Canada to translate weather forecasts from English to French, and is translating close to 80,000 words per day or 30 million words per year until it is replaced by a competitor's system on 30 September 2001. -
Makoto Nagao proposes example-based machine translation.
The idea is to break down sentences into phrases (subsentential units) and learn the translations of those phrases using a corpus of examples. With enough phrases known, new sentences that combine existing phrases in a novel manner can be translated. -
The world's first web translation tool, Babel Fish, is launched as a subdomain of the AltaVista search engine. The tool is created by Systran in collaboration with Digital Equipment Corporation
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Google Translate is launched
