The Beginning
The history of machine translation dates back to the seventeenth century, when philosophers such as Leibniz and Descartes put forward proposals for codes which would relate words between languages. All of these proposals remained theoretical, and none resulted in the development of an actual machine.
The first patents for "translating machines" were applied for in the mid 1930s. One proposal, by Georges Artsrouni was simply an automatic bilingual dictionary using paper tape. The other proposal, by Peter Troyanskii, a Russian, was more detailed. It included both the bilingual dictionary, and a method for dealing with grammatical roles between languages, based on Esperanto. The system was split up into three stages: the first was for a native-speaking editor in the sources language to organise the words into their logical forms and syntactic functions; the second was for the machine to "translate" these forms into the target language; and the third was for a native-speaking editor in the target language to normalise this output. His scheme remained unknown until the late 1950s, by which time computers were well-known.
Read more about this topic: History Of Machine Translation
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