When Is The Next ALPAC Report Due?

~.~chine translation has a scme%~at checquered history. There were already proposals for autcmatic translation systems in the 30's, but it was not until after the second world war that real enthusiasm led to heavy funding and unrealistic expectations. Traditionally, the start of intensive work on machine translation is taken as being a memorand~n of Warren Weaver, then Director of the Natural Sciences Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, in 1949. In this memorandL~n, called 'Translation', Weaver took stock of earlier work done by Booth and Richens. He likened the problem of machine translation to the problem of code breaking, for which digital cc~uters had been used with considerable success : "It is very tempting to say that a book written in Chinese is silly a book written in English which was coded into the 'Chinese code'. If we have useful methods for solving almost any cryptographic problem, may it not be that with proper interpretation we already have useful methods for translation?" (Weaver, 1949).