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What Was The First Machine Translation?

As described by Hutchins Report, on January 7th 1954, the Georgetown-IBM experiment started, the IBM 701 computer automatically translated 60 Russian sentences into English for the first time in history.
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Machine translation (MT) gets a bad rap because it’s perceived as low quality (and the results are sometimes hilarious) — but you’d be surprised how far this technology has advanced since it was first conceived in 1949. Recently, we found TAUS’s comprehensive timeline of the history of MT , and it’s an amazing read. But if you don’t have time to read across 63 years of MT progress, here’s a brief overview:

1949–65: Machine Translation Research Begins

The new field of “machine translation” appears in Warren Weaver’s Memorandum on Translation (1949), and the first researcher in the field, Yehosha Bar-Hillel, begins his research at MIT (1951). A Georgetown MT research team follows (1951) with a public demostration of its system in 1954. MT is touted as a solution to help the U.S. keep tabs on Russian. It’s also one of the first non-numerical applications for computers. MT research programs pop up in Japan and Russia (1955), and the first MT conference is held in London (1956). Researchers continue to join the field as the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics is formed in the U.S. (1962) and the National Academy of Sciences forms a committee (ALPAC) to study MT (1964).

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1966–95: MT Goes to Work

ALPAC’s report states MT cannot compete with human translation quality, and suggests funding for MT research should be stopped. But the research continues. MT is also put to work: the French Textile Institute to translate abstracts from and into French, English, German and Spanish (1970); Brigham Young University starts a project to translate Mormon texts by automated translation (1971); and Xerox uses Systran to translate technical manuals (1978). Various MT companies are launched, including Trados (1984), which is the first to develop and market translation memory technology (1989). The first commercial MT system for Russian/English/German-Ukrainian is developed at Kharkov State University (1991).

1996–2012: MT Hits the Web

MT on the web starts with Systran offering free translation of small texts (1996), followed by AltaVista Babelfish, which racked up 500,000 requests a day (1997). Franz-Josef Och (the future head of Translation Development at Google) wins DARPA’s speed MT competition (2003). More innovations during this time include MOSES, the open-source statistical MT engine (2007), a text/SMS translation service for mobiles in Japan (2008), and a mobile phone with built-in speech-to-speech translation functionality for English, Japanese and Chinese (2009). Recently, Google announced that Google Translate translates roughly enough text to fill 1 million books in one day (2012).

Whew! That’s a lot, and we didn’t cover 90% of the history of machine translation! All the negative talk about MT seems to forget it’s an incredible, advanced technology. Its quality is lower than human translation but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have good, practical uses — like translating old press releases from 5 years ago.

2013-Now (By Austin Ringer, Product Manager)

Recent years have seen significant step advancements in machine translation technology with Google’s research on Neural Machine Translation implying an optimistic future for the industry. It has become clear that machine translation is moving away from being the high speed, untenable quality option for translating organizations, toward offering a reasonable alternative for translating low visibility content. In just a few years, a whole host of machine translation vendors have emerged promising acceptable quality at a fraction of the cost of professional linguists. The race for a competitive edge in quality is in full effect and MT providers are beginning to take differentiated approaches to ‘boost’ the quality that their systems are capable of producing. Today’s, providers generally fall into three categories:

Hybrid Human-MT Solutions (ex: Unbabel)Domain-Adapted Machine Translation(ex: Lilt, IBM)Neural Machine Translation (ex: Google, Microsoft, SDL, Yandex)At Smartling, we strongly believe that machine translation is quickly becoming an important component of an effective globalization strategy. While producing content at low cost and as quickly as possible continues to have an adverse effect on Quality, machine translation offers many translating organizations an edge at achieving the holy grail of translation outcome- a balance of cost, quality, and time-to-market.

9 Related questions Answers found

What is the history of machine translation

In early 1990, at the IBM Research Center, a machine translation system was first shown which knew nothing about rules and linguistics as a whole. It analyzed similar texts in two languages and tried to understand the patterns. The idea was simple yet beautiful.

What is a multi-engine translation approach

A multi-engine approach combines two or more machine translation systems in parallel. The target language output is a combination of the multiple machine translation system's final outputs. Statistical Rule Generation.

What is the history of statistical translation

The revolutionary invention of statistical translation would happen in just five years. In early 1990, at the IBM Research Center, a machine translation system was first shown which knew nothing about rules and linguistics as a whole. It analyzed similar texts in two languages and tried to understand the patterns.

What are the most common types of machine translation

PROMPT and Systran are the most famous examples of RBMT systems. Just take a look at the Aliexpress to feel the soft breath of this golden age. But even they had some nuances and subspecies. This is the most straightforward type of machine translation.

What are the types of machine translation?

There are several types of statistical-based machine translation models which are: Hierarchical phrase-based translation, Syntax-based translation, Phrase-based translation, Word-based translation.

Where is machine translation used?

Machine translation can also be used to translate PowerPoint presentations, intranet bulletins, and other similar documents. The need to translate them is often urgent. Machine translation is an excellent choice in situations where having the materials translated by a human translator would be too large an investment.

Who started the translation?

In the 14th century, the first translation of the Bible from Latin to English was done by John Wycliffe. It was also during this century that Geoffrey Chaucer, an author, poet and translator, translated the works of Boethius from Latin into English and the French work, 'Roman de la Rose' into English.

Who is the father of translation?

The findings will boost our understanding about the process through examination of the dossier of the Greek versions of the Vita Sancti Hilarionis, a Latin hagiographical text composed by Saint Jerome (regarded as the 'Father of Translation') at the end of the 4th century.

Who is the founder of translation?

So, as there is no better answer, we can say that the first formal translator whose identity and work is known was Saint Jerome, who translated the Bible from Hebrew & Greek into Vulgar Latin around 400 A.D. Saint Jerome is considered the patron saint of translators, librarians and encyclopedists.