The outlook for machine translation
Franz L. Alt · 1960
The idea of using electronic digital computers for language translation seems to have arisen about 1946; it was first brought to widespread attention in a memorandum by Warren Weaver in 1949. Today there are about a dozen projects in the United States devoted to machine translation, mostly translation from Russian to English. Many additional projects are located in the Soviet Union, a few in other countries. Many of these projects have been in operation for a number of years. Yet today there is nobody in a position to feed some foreign text into a computing machine and produce automatically an acceptable translation. This is not to say that there have been no accomplishments. Some achievements may be noted, in some other areas there has been considerable progress; and it seems plausible that in a few years completely automatic translation of fair quality will be possible.