Early Years in Machine Translation
Memoirs and biographies of pioneers
Editor
Machine translation (MT) was one of the first non-numerical applications of the computer in the 1950s and 1960s. With limited equipment and programming tools, researchers from a wide range of disciplines (electronics, linguistics, mathematics, engineering, etc.) tackled the unknown problems of language analysis and processing, investigated original and innovative methods and techniques, and laid the foundations not just of current MT systems and computerized tools for translators but also of natural language processing in general. This volume contains contributions by or about the major MT pioneers from the United States, Russia, East and West Europe, and Japan, with recollections of personal experiences, colleagues and rivals, the political and institutional background, the successes and disappointments, and above all the challenges and excitement of a new field with great practical importance. Each article includes a personal bibliography, and the editor provides an overview, chronology and list of sources for the period.
[Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 97] 2000. xii, 400 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
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Preface
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vii
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Common abbreviations
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x
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Acknowledgements. Cyrillic transliteration
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xi
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1
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17
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17
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39
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73
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87
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97
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111
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129
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135
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147
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165
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171
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177
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197
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205
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227
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233
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243
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253
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263
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279
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299
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313
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325
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331
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349
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361
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377
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Index of names
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387
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Index of subjects
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394
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Locations of photographs
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Participants at US conferences
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xii
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Weaver, Reifler, Yngve, Oettinger
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16
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Dostert, Garvin, Zarechnak, Toma
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146
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Brown, Lehmann, Lamb
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196
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Participants at USSR conference; Mel’č uk, Mološnaja, Reformatskij
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232
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Marčuk, Piotrowski, Booth
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252
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Richens, Masterman, Ceccato
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298
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Sgall, Wada, Vauquois
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386
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“It follows the growth of an intellectual community with international scope from the beginning, even in the cold war era. It is the very best source for finding out what really went on in the early years of this field that is rapidly growing in importance with the growth of the internet.”
Victor H. Yngve
“It is the very best source for finding out what really went on in the early years of this field that is rapidly growing in importance. [...] It holds several important lessons and deserves close study by people involved in public policy as it impacts and is impacted by science and technology.”
Victor H. Yngve, University of Chicago
“It holds several important lessons and deserves close study by people involved in public policy as it impacts and is impacted by science and technology.”
Victor H. Yngve
“Although the book is a compilation of articles from the original MT pioneers, [...] that cover the time span from the early 50s, until the mid 70s, this is not a limit because most of today's commercially available MT systems are based on the linguistic techniques and technologies that were designed and implemented during that period.”
Jörg Schütz, IAI in Machine Translation, Spring 2004
“Those of us who have endured conference presentations in which eager authors present long-discarded Machine Translation (MT) theories as the latest and greatest ideas should welcome a book which puts previous research in perspective.”
Winfield Scott Bennett, OnePage, Inc., Denville, N.J.
“In capturing and preserving this impressively wide-ranging collection of reminiscences, John Hutchins has made a huge and enormously valuable contribution to our understanding of the ideas, personalities, and external forces that shaped the early development of machine translation and computational linguistics and that set in motion many of the activities in those areas that are still ongoing today. I heartily recommend this book not only for readers engaged in those or related fields, but also for anyone with an interest in the history of science.”
Warren J. Plath
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Johnson, Roger G.
2010.
In History of Computing. Learning from the Past [IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, 325],
► pp. 26 ff.
Kalantzis, Mary & Bill Cope
2020.
In Adding Sense,
Lennon, Brian
2014.
In A Companion to Translation Studies,
► pp. 133 ff.
Martin-Nielsen, Janet
2010. ‘This war for men’s minds’: the birth of a human science in Cold War America.
History of the Human Sciences 23:5 ► pp. 131 ff.
Ramati, Ido & Amit Pinchevski
2018. Uniform multilingualism: A media genealogy of Google Translate.
New Media & Society 20:7 ► pp. 2550 ff.
Vidhu Bhala, R. V. & S. Abirami
2014. Trends in word sense disambiguation.
Artificial Intelligence Review 42:2 ► pp. 159 ff.
Wang, Hongfei
2014.
In 2014 5th International Conference on Digital Home,
► pp. 226 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 05 september 2020. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
Subjects
Translation & Interpreting Studies
BIC Subject: CF – Linguistics
BISAC Subject: LAN009000 – LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number: 00062138