Progress in machine translation

IT is now twelve years since I tentatively suggested that it should be possible to translate a foreign language by means of a digital computer. During this period many people have started to work on the idea, and we have now reached a stage when at least in theory it would be possible to set about building a special purpose translating machine. It may be interesting, therefore, to survey how tar we have progressed and to venture a prediction about the future. In order to do so we have to be quite clear what is meant by a translation: there are two possible levels of definition. First, we could say that the process of translation consists in replacing a set of words in one language— the "source" language—by another set of words in a second language—the "target" language—the latter set expressing not only the meaning but also the intention of the original author. The inclusion of intention covers the possibility of replacing, say, poetry in one language by poetry in another. The other, and less demanding, definition of translation would require only that the second set of words should reproduce the ideas contained in the original language, but should not attempt to reproduce the stylistic intentions of the original writer. It must be explained at once that the mechanical realisation of a high quality translation conveying intention as well as meaning is still very far away. You may be wondering how a computing machine designed to work with numbers can be used to translate words. The answer is quite simple. The letters of the alphabet in the source language or languages from which the machine is required to translate are "coded " in numerical form. For example, we might use the numerals 01 to represent A, 02 to represent B, 03 to represent C, and so on throughout the alphabet. A word is then represented by a string of numbers, each number being the code equivalent for the letter. Thus the word "translation" would be represented by the numbers 20 18 01 14 19 12 01 20 09 15 14 T R A N S L A T I O N In its simplest form, translating, or more properly transcribing, by a human being consists merely of looking up meanings of the word of the source language in a dictionary and finding its equivalent in the target language. This is precisely the same process as looking up the logarithm of a number or the sine of an angle in a mathematical table. It would not require an extremely complex machine to perform this function, provided that the machine contained somewhere inside it all the information contained in a dictionary.