MT: recent developments

Nineteen eighty-six has been a conclusive year for machine translation (MT). The world’s press has reported more fully than ever on the various operational systems now in use as well as on research and development projects for the future, while John Hutchins has finally succeeded in restoring the reputation of MT as a respectable field of science with the appearance of his scholarly work Machine translation — past, present, future. Such positive signs of maturity have, however, been accompanied by the loss of a number of key figures in the field. Richard Ruffino, who had done much to ensure the success of machine translation at the Xerox Corporation, passed on in the spring, as did Margaret Masterman of the Cambridge Language Research Unit, who had shown remarkable foresight in her studies on the improvability of MT systems. More recently, we have learnt of the death of Ziggy Pankowicz, who was extremely active in the 1970s and who will be remembered, in particular, for the encouragement he gave to the Logos development. I should also mention that Stan Sereda, who was instrumental in convincing General Motors of the benefits of MT and who has been running a successful SYSTRAN operation there since 1975, will be retiring at the end of this month. Finally, at the World SYSTRAN Conference organised by Ian Pigott last February in Luxembourg, we learnt that Peter Toma — who has probably done more than any other individual to further the cause of machine translation — had decided to sell out his SYSTRAN interests in order to be able to devote more time to his primary interest, world peace.