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The history of viable computer-based machine translation can be traced to a memo sent to around 30 colleagues in July 1949 by Warren Weaver. Weaver, a director at the Rockefeller Foundation, put forward specific proposals for tackling the obvious problems of ambiguity (or ‘multiple meanings’), based on his knowledge of cryptography, statistics, information theory, logic and language universals.

The Weaver memorandum is probably the single most influential publication in the early days of machine translation, since it formulated goals and methods before most people had any idea of what computers might be capable of, and since it was the direct stimulus for the beginnings of research first in the United States and then later, indirectly, throughout the world.

For those interested in the history of machine translation, might we suggest that John Hutchins personal web site is the most comprehensive and authoritative we have found.

Weaver’s memorandum resulted in the research and development of the work which resulted in the first public demonstration of machine translation.

The demonstration in New York of the the Georgetown-IBM system on January 7, 1954, involved a Russian-English machine translation system and created a great deal of interest and raised public expectations of an automatic system capable of high quality translation in the short order. Although a small-scale experiment of just 250 words and six ‘grammar’ rules. This paper describes the background motivations, the linguistic methods, and the computational techniques of the system.

The final word on the subject of the history of Machine translation came from Wiggins in a throwaway line during our discussions. “To put it simply, MT has been about 50 years of MT promises – a fortnight ago we began to change all that”

Further reading on machine translation

The International Association for Machine Translation (IAMT) is comprised of three bodies, the European Association of Machine Translation (EAMT), the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) and the Asian-Pacific Association for Machine Translation (AAMT).

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