Mechanical Translation and Related Language

ing and development of hardware. The adoption of this plan constitutes recognition by the agencies involved that "fully automatic high-quality language processing, including mechanical translation, is a long-range goal," and that cooperation in planning and research are necessary to progress in this field. A recent important step under the Joint Automatic Language Processing Program has been the appointment by the National Academy of Sciences of John R. Pierce as chairman of an advisory committee for automatic language processing. When fully established, the committee will provide the agencies participating in the joint program with advice which will aid them in planning future research, development, and evaluation in this field. Warren Weaver concludes his note "Translation," referred to earlier (3), by indicating four possible types of attack on the mechanical translation problem. As for the fourth, he says, Indeed, what seems ... to be the most promising approach of all is one based on ... an approach that goes so deeply into the structure of languages as to come down to the level where they exhibit common traits. . . . Such a program involves a presumably tremendous amount of work in the logical structure of languages before one would be ready for any mechanization. . . . But it is along such general lines that it seems likely that the problem of translation can be attacked successfully. Such a program has the advantage that, whether or not it lead to a useful mechanization of the translation problem, it could not fail to shed much useful light on the general problem of communication. The history of mechanical translation research has shown Warren Weaver's insight of 15 years ago to have been remarkably prophetic. References and Notes 1. J. B. Wiesner, "Communication sciences in a university environment," paper presented at the Conference on Scientific Information, San Jose, California, 1958, and published in IBM J. Res. Develop. 2, 271 (1958). 2. Y. Bar-Hillel, "The present status of automatic translation of languages," in Advances in Computers, F. L. Alt, Ed. (Academic Press, New York, 1960), vol. 1, p. 135. 3. The entire note is reproduced in Machine Translation of Languages, W. N. Locke and A. D. Booth, Eds. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, Cambridge, 1955), pp. 15-23. 4. Sci. Inform. Notes 5, No. 6 and 7 (19631964). 5. W. D. Climenson, N. H. Hardwick, S. N. Jacobson, Am. Doc. 12, No. 3, 178 (1961). 6. G. Salton, ibid. 14, No. 3, 213 (1963). 7. I am grateful to the National Bureau of Standards and to the project leader, Mrs. Ida Rhodes, for the opportunity to participate for a time in research there on mechanical translation. 8. C. Dougherty, S. M. Lamb, S. E. Martin, "Chinese Character Indexes" (Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, 1963). 9. The Bunker Ramo Corporation was formerly the Ramo-Wooldridge Division of Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, Inc. 10. Y. Bar-Hillel, "Machine translation: The end of an illusion," in Information Processing 1962 (proceedings of the International Federation for Information Processing Congress, held in Munich, 1962), C. M. Popplewell, Ed. (North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1963), p. 331.