Let IBM Translate It
Chemical & Engineering News · 1957
Machine translation and other information retrieval methods are growing closer together. Joint efforts of linguists, computer engineers, data-searching specialists, programmers, and mathematicians show that the solution of the problem of machine translation is by no means exclusively a question of linguistic research. The immediate practical aim of machine translation is to accelerate communication among scientific workers, regardless of the language in which their findings may be expressed. When the problems of machine translation are resolved, the present lapse of months or years between first publication of research results and their availability in other languages will be significantly reduced. Yet, machine translation will have to justify itself economically. L. E. Dostert of Georgetown University's Institute of Languages and Linguistics told die Division of Chemical Literature that, in his opinion, language translation by machine will prove as economically sound as the use of computation equipment. Mechanically, a logical machine must read an input text in the source ...