Louis, while the Atomic Energy Commission and Euratom, in Italy, used a system developed at Georgetown University. The United States Air Force used a system produced by IBM and Washington University in St. During this period operational systems were installed. For example, generative linguistics and transformational grammar were exploited to improve the quality of translations. Įarly systems used large bilingual dictionaries and hand-coded rules for fixing the word order in the final output which was eventually considered too restrictive in linguistic developments at the time. Nevertheless, it encouraged the idea that machine translation was imminent and stimulated the financing of the research, not only in the US but worldwide. It had only 250 words and translated 49 carefully selected Russian sentences into English – mainly in the field of chemistry. The system itself, however, was no more than a "toy" system. The demonstration was widely reported in the newspapers and garnered public interest. This was the first public demonstration of a machine translation system. On 7 January 1954 the Georgetown-IBM experiment was held in New York at the head office of IBM. 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.Ī few years after Weaver submitted his proposals, research began in earnest at many universities in the United States. 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". Troyanskii's proposal remained unknown until the late 1950s, by which time computers were well-known and utilized. This system was separated into three stages: stage one consisted of a native-speaking editor in the source language to organize the words into their logical forms and to exercise the syntactic functions stage two required the machine to "translate" these forms into the target language and stage three required a native-speaking editor in the target language to normalize this output. 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. In the mid-1930s the first patents for "translating machines" were applied for by Georges Artsrouni, for an automatic bilingual dictionary using paper tape. In 1629, René Descartes proposed a universal language, with equivalent ideas in different tongues sharing one symbol. The idea of machine translation later appeared in the 17th century. The origins of machine translation can be traced back to the work of Al-Kindi, a 9th-century Arabic cryptographer who developed techniques for systemic language translation, including cryptanalysis, frequency analysis, and probability and statistics, which are used in modern machine translation. Several of these programs are available online, such as Google Translate and the SYSTRAN system that powers AltaVista's BabelFish (which was replaced by Microsoft Bing translator in May 2012). Interest grew in statistical models for machine translation, which became more common and also less expensive in the 1980s as available computational power increased.Īlthough there exists no autonomous system of "fully automatic high quality translation of unrestricted text," there are many programs now available that are capable of providing useful output within strict constraints. The achieved progress was much slower than expected in 1966, the ALPAC report found that ten years of research had not fulfilled the expectations of the Georgetown experiment and resulted in dramatically reduced funding. Ĭonsequently, the success of the experiment ushered in an era of significant funding for machine translation research in the United States. In the Soviet Union, similar experiments were performed shortly after. Researchers of the Georgetown experiment asserted their belief that machine translation would be a solved problem within three to five years. The Georgetown experiment, which involved successful fully automatic translation of more than sixty Russian sentences into English in 1954, was one of the earliest recorded projects. In the 1950s, machine translation became a reality in research, although references to the subject can be found as early as the 17th century. 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. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. The reason given is: needs update for 2010s.
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