History of Machine Translation - The 1980s and Early 1990s

The 1980s and Early 1990s

By the 1980s, both the diversity and the number of installed systems for machine translation had increased. A number of systems relying on mainframe technology were in use, such as Systran, Logos, Ariane-G5, and Metal.

As a result of the improved availability of microcomputers, there was a market for lower-end machine translation systems. Many companies took advantage of this in Europe, Japan, and the USA. Systems were also brought onto the market in China, Eastern Europe, Korea, and the Soviet Union.

During the 1980s there was a lot of activity in MT in Japan especially. With the Fifth generation computer Japan intended to leap over its competition in computer hardware and software, and one project that many large Japanese electronics firms found themselves involved in was creating software for translating to and from English (Fujitsu, Toshiba, NTT, Brother, Catena, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Sharp, Sanyo, Hitachi, NEC, Panasonic, Kodensha, Nova, Oki).

Research during the 1980s typically relied on translation through some variety of intermediary linguistic representation involving morphological, syntactic, and semantic analysis.

At the end of the 1980s there was a large surge in a number of novel methods for machine translation. One system was developed at IBM that was based on statistical methods. Makoto Nagao and his group used methods based on large numbers of example translations, a technique which is now termed example-based machine translation. A defining feature of both of these approaches was the lack of syntactic and semantic rules and reliance instead on the manipulation of large text corpora.

During the 1990s, encouraged by successes in speech recognition and speech synthesis, research began into speech translation with the development of the German Verbmobil project.

There was significant growth in the use of machine translation as a result of the advent of low-cost and more powerful computers. It was in the early 1990s that machine translation began to make the transition away from large mainframe computers toward personal computers and workstations. Two companies that led the PC market for a time were Globalink and MicroTac, following which a merger of the two companies (in December 1994) was found to be in the corporate interest of both. Intergraph and Systran also began to offer PC versions around this time. Sites also became available on the internet, such as AltaVista's Babel Fish (using Systran technology) and Google Language Tools (also initially using Systran technology exclusively).