Machine translation.

THE possibility of using electronic calculators for the mechanization of the translation process was first seriously considered early in 1945. It occurred to Dr. Warren Weaver, then a director of the Rockefeller Foundation, that it might be possible to make use of, or to design, such machines for the high-speed mass translation of scientific publications. On July 15, 1949, Dr. Weaver wrote a memorandum, entitled Translation, which he sent to some two hundred scholars working in various fields. In this memorandum he mentioned his attempts to interest experts in cybernetics in his idea, and, fully aware of the complexity of the linguistic problems involved, he outlined several lines of attack in which due consideration is given to the phenomenon of language universals, to the problem of multiple meaning, and to the pinpointing function of environment and context. Dr. Weaver sent me a copy of his memorandum because he referred in it to a paper which I read in April 1947, before the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia on "The Chinese Language in the Light of Comparative Semantics," in which I gave numerous examples demonstrating agreements between unrelated languages which are not due to borrowing or cross-fertilization. (An abstract of this paper was published in Science 107: 586, June 4, 1948.) Dr. Weaver used one of my comparative semantic examples in support of one of the four lines of attack he suggests for the solution of the automation of the translation process. Let me give you some examples for such extraordinary agreements between unrelated languages. A striking example is Chinese t'ung (*), which means "child" as well as "pupil of the eye" (in the latter sense today written Xj -that is augmented by R which means "eye"). Many languages share this phenomenon of the association of the two, apparently incompatible, notions of "child" and "pupil of the eye" in one and the same word. English "pupil", which also means "school child," is itself derived from Latin pupilla meaning "little girl" (pupillus means