Machine translation over fifty years

The history of machine translation is described from its beginnings in the 1940s to the present day. In the earliest years, efforts were concentrated either on developing immediately useful systems, however crude in their translation quality, or on fundamental research for high quality translation systems. After the ALPAC report in 1966, which virtually ended MT research in the US for more than a decade, research focussed on the development of systems requiring human assistance for producing translations of technical documentation, on translation tools for direct use by translators themselves, and, in recent years, on systems for translating email, Web pages and other Internet documentation, where poor quality is acceptable in the interest of rapid results.