Machine Translation and Machine‐Aided Translation

The recent report for the Commission of the European Communities on current multilingual activities in the field of scientific and technical information 1 and the 1977 conference on the same theme 2 both included substantial sections on operational and experimental machine translation systems, and in its Plan of action 3 the Commission announced its intention to introduce an operational machine translation system into its departments and to support research projects on machine translation. This revival of interest in machine translation may well have surprised many who have tended in recent years to dismiss it as one of the 'great failures' of scientific research. What has changed? What grounds are there now for optimism about machine translation? Or is it still a 'utopian dream'? The aim of this review is to give a general picture of present activities which may help readers to reach their own conclusions. After a sketch of the historical background and general aims (section I), it describes operational and experimental machine translation systems of recent years (section II), it continues with descriptions of interactive (man-machine) systems and machine-assisted translation (section III), and it concludes with a general survey of present problems and future possibilities (section IV). I. HISTORY AND BACKGROUND 1. Although the first proposals for the mechanization of translation were made over forty years ago (independently by a Russian, Smirnov-Troyanskii, and by a Frenchman, Artsrouni) it was only with the general availability of the electronic computer after the war that the idea was taken up seriously 4. Tentative experiments had been conducted in Britain since 1946, but it was a memorandum sent by Warren Weaver to some 200 of his acquaintances in 1949 5 that launched machine translation as a scientific enterprise. Research groups were formed all over the United States. Simple demonstrations of the technical feasibility of machine translation (henceforth: MT), notably the 1954 demonstration by IBM and the research team at Georgetown University, 6 encouraged US government agencies to invest vast sums in MT research. By 1965 it was estimated that MT research had been supported at seventeen institutions to the tune of almost 20 million dollars 7. Early 'breakthroughs' promising commercially available MT systems 'within five years' (the most popular forecast) 8 came to nothing; awareness of the linguistic complexities of the task grew steadily; failure to develop optical character readers (so crucial to economically attractive MT) was a further disappointment; and the …