Though a fairly touchy subject amongst professional translators, machine translation is a field that has always interested us here at The Lingua File. Machine translation had been theorised before the 1950s but today well be looking at one of the first forays into the field. In the 1950s Soviet-American relations were poor, as they were during much of the late 20th century. The Russian language was of particular interest to the Americans, and though professional translations were available, there were concerns that human translations were subject to political bias and interference. The concept of machine translation had been suggested as early as the 17th century by philosophers René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. However, it was a discussion between Warren Weaver and Andrew Booth in 1947 that suggested that natural languages could be translated via the use of a computer. Between the late 1940s and early 1950s, several experiments in machine (ormechanical) translation were conducted. However, these experiments were limited, used punched card systems, and were hardly groundbreaking.
Posted on: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 03:17:33 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015