Difference between revisions of "Timeline of machine translation"

 

This is a timeline of [[machine translation]]. For a more detailed qualitative account, see the [[history of machine translation]] page.

| 1924 || February || Proposal || The first known machine translation proposal was made in [[Estonia]] and involved a typewriter-translator.

| 1933 || July 5 || Proposal || [[Georges Artsrouni]] patents a general-purpose device with many potential applications in [[France]]. He seems to have been working on the device since 1929.<ref name=twoprecursors>{{cite web|url=http://www.hutchinsweb.me.uk/IJT-2004.pdf|title = Two precursors of machine translation|year = 2004|accessdate = February 1, 2014|last = Hutchins|first = John}}</ref>

| 1933 || September 5 || Proposal || [[Peter Petrovich Troyanskii]] is awarded an author's certificate (patent) for a proposal to use a mechanized dictionary for translation between languages.<ref name=twoprecursors/><ref name=troyanskii>{{cite journal|last = Hutchins|first = John|last2 = Lovtskii|first2 = Evgenii|year = 2000|title = Petr Petrovich Troyanskii (1894-1950): A Forgotten Pioneer of Mechanical Translation|jstor = 40009018|journal = Machine Translation|publisher = Springer|volume = 15|issue = 3|pages=187–221}}</ref>

| 1949 || July || Proposal || [[Warren Weaver]], working for the [[Rockefeller Foundation]] in the United States, puts forward a proposal for machine translation based on [[information theory]], successes of [[cryptography|code breaking]] during the [[World War II|second world war]] and speculation about universal underlying principles of natural language.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/WJHutchins/Weaver49.htm|title=Weaver memorandum|date=March 1949|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20061005232830/http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/WJHutchins/Weaver49.htm|archivedate=2006-10-05}}</ref>

| 1954 || January 7 || Demonstration || The [[Georgetown-IBM experiment]], held at the IBM head office in [[New York City]] in the United States, offers the first public demonstration of machine translation. The system itself, however, is no more than what today would be called a "toy" system, having just 250 words and translating just 49 carefully selected Russian sentences into English — mainly in the field of [[chemistry]]. Nevertheless, it encourages the view that machine translation was imminent — and in particular stimulates the financing of the research, not just in the US but worldwide.<ref name=nutshell>{{cite web|author=Hutchins, J.|year=2005|url=http://www.hutchinsweb.me.uk/Nutshell-2005.pdf|title=The history of machine translation in a nutshell}}{{self-published source|date=December 2013}}</ref>

| 1958-1960 || || Report || In 1958, linguist [[Yehoshua Bar-Hillel]] travels around the world visiting machine translation centers to better understand the work they were doing. In 1959, he writes up a report (intended primarily for the US government) pointing out some key difficulties with machine translation that he believed might doom the efforts then underway. An expanded version of the report is published in 1960 in the annual review journal ''Advances in Computers''.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.hutchinsweb.me.uk/Bar-Hillel-2000.pdf|title = Yehoshua Bar-Hillel: A Philosopher's Contribution to Machine Translation|last = Hutchins|first = John|year = 2000|accessdate = February 1, 2014}}</ref> His main argument was that existing methods offered no way of resolving semantic ambiguities whose resolution required having an understanding of the terms being used, such as the ambiguity arising from a single word having multiple meanings.

| 1966 || || Report || [[ALPAC]] publishes a report commissioned by the United States government. The report concludes that machine translation is more expensive, less accurate and slower than human translation, and that despite the expenses, machine translation is not likely to reach the quality of a human translator in the near future. It recommends that tools be developed to aid translators — automatic dictionaries, for example — and that some research in computational linguistics should continue to be supported.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=9547|title = Languages and Machines: Computers in Translation and Linguistics|publisher = [[ALPAC]]|year = 1966|accessdate = February 1, 2014}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.hutchinsweb.me.uk/ALPAC-1996.pdf|title = ALPAC: the (in)famous report|last = Hutchins|first = John|year = 1996|accessdate = February 1, 2014}}</ref> The report causes a significant decline in government funding for machine translation in the US, and to a lesser extent in the UK and Russia.

| 1968 || || Creation of organization || [[SYSTRAN]] is started by [[Peter Toma]].{{citation needed|date=February 2014}}

| 1970 || || Creation of organization || [[Logos]] is started by Bernard Scott.{{citation needed|date=February 2014}}

| 1977 || || Deployment || The [[METEO System]], developed at the [[Université de Montréal]], is installed in [[Canada]] to translate weather forecasts from English to French, and is translating close to 80,000 words per day or 30 million words per year until it is replaced by a competitor's system on 30 September 2001.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.citt.gc.ca/procure/determin/pr2b029_e.asp#P90_10741|title=PROCUREMENT PROCESS|work=Canadian International Trade Tribunal|date=30 July 2002|accessdate=2007-02-10|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20110706181412/http://www.citt.gc.ca/procure/determin/pr2b029_e.asp#P90_10741|archivedate=2011-07-06}}</ref>

| 1984 || || Proposal || [[Makoto Nagao]] proposes [[example-based machine translation]]. The idea is to break down sentences into phrases (subsentential units) and learn the translations of those phrases using a corpus of examples. With enough phrases known, new sentences that combine existing phrases in a novel manner can be translated.<ref>{{Cite book |author= [[Makoto Nagao]] |title= Artificial and Human Intelligence |chapter= A framework of a mechanical translation between Japanese and English by analogy principle |editor= A. Elithorn and R. Banerji |year= 1984 |publisher= [[Elsevier Science Publishers]] |url= http://www.mt-archive.info/Nagao-1984.pdf }}</ref>

| 1997 || || Web translation tool || The world's first web translation tool, [[Yahoo! Babel Fish|Babel Fish]], is launched as a subdomain of the [[AltaVista]] search engine. The tool is created by [[Systran]] in collaboration with [[Digital Equipment Corporation]].<ref>{{cite web|title=Real-Time Machine Translation on the Internet |url=http://www.infotektur.com/demos/babelfish/en.html |date=May 1998 |publisher=Infotektur.com |accessdate=2012-07-18}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|last=Edge |first=Business |url=http://www.businessedge.ca/archives/article.cfm/babelfish-on-the-move-3074/ |title=BabelFish on the move - Business Edge News Magazine Archives |publisher=Businessedge.ca |date=2003-05-15 |accessdate=2012-09-20}}</ref>

| 2006 || April || Web translation tool || [[Google Translate]] is launched.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.google.com/about/company/history/#2006|title = Our history in depth (2006)|publisher = [[Google]]|accessdate = February 2, 2014}}</ref>

* [[Timeline of machine learning]]

[[Category:Machine translation]]

[[Category:Computing timelines|Machine translation]]