Abstract
The first phase of the automation of language comprises two stages: machine translation (MT) in the early 1950s and computational linguistics in the early 1960s. This phase was accompanied by the sudden introduction of a new horizon of retrospection for linguistics during the brief period lasting from 1948 until 1966. This was the result of the massive intervention by those institutions that had made drastic decisions about orientating and financing science in the wake of the upheaval caused by World War II. As a technology of war, machine translation was developed in the USA by government authorities, which devoted considerable resources to MT in order to respond to the strategic and political challenges in the post-war period. On the back, computational linguistics was proposed as the “new linguistics” in a quite ruthless way.
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Notes
- 1.
The first public MT demonstration by computer took place in January 1954 in New York on an IBM machine. It was organised by the Georgetown University MT group under the direction of Leon Dostert and involved the translation of a few sentences from Russian into English using a Russian-English bilingual lexicon of 150 terms and an “operational syntax” including six operations regulating the parsing. Paul Garvin from Georgetown University and Peter Sheridan from IBM led the demonstration (Dostert 1955).
- 2.
For a detailed history of the early years of machine translation, see Hutchins (1986a, 2000a).
- 3.
The first translating machines, The USAF Automatic Language Translator Mark I (1958) and The USAF Automatic Language Translator Mark II (1964), were developed in the USA by Telemeter-Magnetics Inc. for the US Air Force. They used Gilbert King’s photoscopic memory which combined very large storage capacity with very fast access (Léon 1992; Hutchins 2000b).
- 4.
- 5.
Three main types of systems were developed in the pioneering years of MT: (i) direct translation, or word by word translation, is essentially based on a bilingual dictionary (see, e.g. Richens and Booth’s Pidgin English in Chap. 7); (ii) transfer method is based on a bilingual dictionary and syntactic analysis translation programs. Source Language analysis and Target Language synthesis are to some extent independent of particular Source Language-Target Language pairs. These programs were developed within the framework of the constitution of automatic syntactic analysis as an autonomous field (see Chaps. 3 and 4); (iii) intermediary language method is based on semantic analysis (see Chap. 7) (for more information, see Hutchins 1986a, b).
- 6.
- 7.
From 1941 onwards, after the Blitz in Great Britain and the attack on Pearl Harbor, fire-control and anti-aircraft defense became priorities for the Americans. Two teams devoted themselves to it at MIT. A first device was worked out by the fusion of Vannevar Bush’s work at MIT (Radiation Lab’s experimental XT-1) and that of the Bell Laboratories (Bell Lab’s M-9 predictor). Still at MIT, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow worked on a statistical system of fire control. For this purpose, Wiener wrote a theoretical text “The Extrapolation, Interpolation and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series”, immediately classified by Weaver, then the director of the D-2 section. Weaver gave the text to only a few scientists, bound to secrecy, who named it “Yellow Peril” because of its yellow binding. According to Conway and Siegelman (2005), this text would constitute the first outline of communications theory, developed later by Claude Shannon, and opened the way for various technological developments, among them automatic control systems (for more details see Conway and Siegelman 2005, p. 110–116).
- 8.
Its charter was clear: “Project RAND is a continuing program of scientific study and research on the broad subject of air warfare with the object of recommending to the Air Force preferred methods, techniques and instrumentalities for this purpose” (Abella 2008, p.14).
- 9.
A deverbal is a word or a component of a word that is derived from a verb.
- 10.
See the answer of the editorial board of TAL entitled “Effectiveness of the TALN and linguists” in issue 1996–1 (p. 162) which mentions the tensions between industrial research and linguists.
- 11.
In order to ridicule the weakness of MT systems, some funny translations from English into Russian of quotations from the Bible were often reported: “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak”, translated again from Russian into English gives us: “The whisky is strong, but the meat is rotten” or “The ghost is a volunteer but the meat is tender”. In fact, they were human mistranslations, reported by a journalist (in 1956) and attributed to the machine (see Hutchins 1995 for a more detailed discussion).
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Léon, J. (2021). Machine Translation as Technology of War. In: Automating Linguistics. History of Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70642-5_2
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