R.H. Richens : Translation in the NUDE
Karen Spärck Jones · 2006
done before, but he had an early interest in MT and had collaborated with Booth in research written up in 1948 but not published until later (Richens and Booth, 1955). Between then and his involvement with CLRU, he apparently did not do any work on MT, apart from responding to inquiries by journalists and to J.E. Holmström, who was writing a report for Unesco and wanted to say something about the possible automation of translation (Hutchins, 1997). One point of importance is that his formal employment was with the then Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux: he was Assistant Director, later Director, of the Cambridge Bureau on Plant Breeding and Genetics. The Bureau was responsible for a specialised abstracting service, so Richens would have experienced at first hand the growth of scientific literature which was one of the main stimuli for research on automatic translation and indexing. Richens did not publish much on MT, presumably because his work on it arose from personal interest rather than through his regular job. His ideas as developed in the Cambridge context are essentially given in Richens (1956a) and Richens (1958). Richens ’ interest was in the role of an interlingua in MT. This was a feature of the CLRU’s research on MT, figuring in relation to Chinese ideograms, and in the key form of a thesaurus,