History of Machine Translation

The idea of using computers to help in translation, as observed earlier, was an accidental by-product of war-time research into the possibility of code breaking, or deciphering the secret codes of the enemy. Although William Weaver was the first to submit a proposal for machine translation, it was Yehoshua BarHillel in the US who became the first researcher in MT in 1951. The desire to gain an upper hand in military matters motivated countries like the US to be liberal in funding such research. In 1954 came the first demonstration of MT when a Russian-English translation system was jointly developed by a team of researchers. Since this was based in Georgetown University, this came to be known as the Georgetown experiment. This initial success spurred the US to invest further in MT research. Other countries like Britain, Japan and the Soviet Union were also involved in research at their own levels in this area. The 1950s saw the height of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union, and it was but natural if both countries attempted to outdo the other in military research.

However, the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC) report published in 1964 in the US put a halt to the burgeoning interest in MT research. The report gave a negative feedback on MT, saying that “MT was slower, less accurate and twice as expensive as human translation, and that there was no immediate or predictable prospect of useful MT” (“Machine Translation”, 140). This was a dampener, and government funding tapered off in the US. However, there were research groups in various parts of the developed world which were working using private funds. The TAUM group in Montreal managed to develop a translation system that was able to replace human translators in the translation of weather bulletins from English to French. SYSTRAN, a translation system developed by Peter Toma in California was used by NASA to translate from Russian to English. These private ventures again revived the waning interest in MT research leading to the Commission of the European Communities (CEC) to fund the Eurotra in 1978, which is the largest MT project ever undertaken till date..

MT research took off again after this and commercial MT systems began to make their appearance. There was more interest in this in Europe than in the US. The 1970s also saw rapid changes in the fields that contributed to MT – in Linguistics and Computer Science. There was immense speculation especially in the field of Computer Science, about the prospects of Artificial Intelligence or the ‘intelligence’ that was required of a machine to translate a text.Computer scientists work in tandem with linguists to understand the process of language cognition, which is a very significant component in developing artificial intelligence. This has contributed to the development of MT research..