A survey of machine translation in the former USSR
Lev L. Nelyubin · Perspectives · 1997
The article covers the thirty year history of machine translation (henceforth MT) in the former Soviet Union. The author stresses the necessity of developing MT in view of the changing social and economic conditions of present‐day life. MT is considered to be an efficient way of dealing with the substantial imbalance between the volume of incoming information and the human capacity to process it. Two types of translation are identified from a functional‐communicative point of view, namely literary and specialised translation. The author specifies that in his view MT cannot be used for the translation of literary texts but only of administrative, technical and scientific texts, the domain of specialised translation. The Linguistic Translation Theory forms a theoretical background for specialised translation. Applied linguistics is based on The Linguistic Translation Theory, which it restructures and transforms for the needs of MT and Machine‐Assisted Translation. The issues of applied linguistics are best identified in those areas where the beginnings of the theory and practice of MT are designed by joint teams of mathematicians and programmers, linguists and professional translators who work closely together. A description of such teamwork on MT strategies at the Moscow Institute of Exact Mathematics and Computer Systems in the 1950s and 1960s takes up the larger part of the article.