The 1960s, The ALPAC Report and The Seventies
Research in the 1960s in both the Soviet Union and the United States concentrated mainly on the Russian-English language pair. Chiefly the objects of translation were scientific and technical documents, such as articles from scientific journals. The rough translations produced were sufficient to get a basic understanding of the articles. If an article discussed a subject deemed to be of security interest, it was sent to a human translator for a complete translation; if not, it was discarded.
A great blow came to machine translation research in 1966 with the publication of the ALPAC report. The report was commissioned by the US government and performed by ALPAC, the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee, a group of seven scientists convened by the US government in 1964. The US government was concerned that there was a lack of progress being made despite significant expenditure. It concluded that machine translation was more expensive, less accurate and slower than human translation, and that despite the expenses, machine translation was not likely to reach the quality of a human translator in the near future.
The report, however, recommended that tools be developed to aid translators — automatic dictionaries, for example — and that some research in computational linguistics should continue to be supported.
The publication of the report had a profound impact on research into machine translation in the United States, and to a lesser extent the Soviet Union and United Kingdom. Research, at least in the US, was almost completely abandoned for over a decade. In Canada, France and Germany, however, research continued. In the US the main exceptions were the founders of Systran (Peter Toma) and Logos (Bernard Scott), who established their companies in 1968 and 1970 respectively and served the US Dept of Defense. In 1970, the Systran system was installed for the United States Air Force and subsequently in 1976 by the Commission of the European Communities. The METEO System, developed at the Université de Montréal, was installed in Canada in 1977 to translate weather forecasts from English to French, and was translating close to 80,000 words per day or 30 million words per year until it was replaced by a competitor's system on the 30th September, 2001.
While research in the 1960s concentrated on limited language pairs and input, demand in the 1970s was for low-cost systems that could translate a range of technical and commercial documents. This demand was spurred by the increase of globalisation and the demand for translation in Canada, Europe, and Japan.
Read more about this topic: History Of Machine Translation
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