An Experiment on the Machine Translation of Languages Carried out on the Besm

The idea of machine translation of languages was recently given realization in the U.S.S.R., and a detailed description is given of the lines on which the experiment has been carried out. A combination of a special-type dictionary and a revised grammar was used to furnish the translation of scientific texts. The dictionary compiled for the purpose differs from the usual type in that it does not limit the meanings of the words to the so-called 'dictionary meanings', but reflects the life and language connections of the words more precisely. English words with multiple meaning form a special section of the dictionary. Grammar information of a word is obtained partly from the dictionary, but final conclusions are not made until a series of 'grammar programmes', independent of the dictionary, have determined the grammatical form of the word by analysing its morphology and place in the sentence. When both meaning and grammar information of every word in the English sentence is obtained, the English-analysis part of the programme is replaced by the Russian-synthesis programme, which is working independently, and thus can be used in machine translation from any languages. English words and their Russian equivalents are stored in a coded form. The Baudot code is used to replace words by numbers, which then undergo ordinary calculating-machine operations according to the instructions fixed in a series of programmes devised for the purpose. The results of the calculations are decoded and printed in Russian script by a teletyper.