The first MT patents

Today machine translation means using a computer to translate natural languages. But it was not always so. The first suggestions that languages could be translated mechanically were made before electronic digital computers were even dreamt of. While the real history of MT began in March 1947 with correspondence between Warren Weaver and Norbert Wiener and with tentative discussions between Weaver and Andrew D. Booth (not in 1946 as Booth himself sometimes asserted later), it is nevertheless legitimate to recognise precursors in two patents submitted sixty years ago in 1933. One patent was issued in Paris on 22 July 1933 to Georges Artsrouni; the other was issued in Moscow on 5 September 1933 to Petr Petrovich Troyanskii. Both patents referred essentially to the construction of mechanical multilingual dictionaries.