Invitational Meeting on Machine Translation

The practical utilization of recorded knowledge often requires its communication between persons who read and write different languages. In dealing with the translation problem which thereby arises, a variety of solutions are possible or conceivable. Perhaps the simplest solution, in theory at least, would be to adopt some one language as standard throughout the world for the purpose of communicating recorded knowledge. This would mean, of course, that persons who do not know the selected language would have to learn it well enough to read and to write it. This approach would place most of the translation burden on the authors of written documents. At various stages in history one language or another has been widely used for written communication by persons who may not speak it as their mother tongue. Thus, during the Middle Ages, Latin was widely used for learned communication. More recently, particularly in the latter part of the 19th century and the early years of the present century, there was a tendency for German to dominate the scene in the field of chemistry. In more recent years, there has been a trend to ever wider use of English, particularly in the fields of science and technology. Such trends have not, historically speaking, worked out to the logical conclusion of universal acceptance of some one language. The rise of modern science was accompanied by increasing use of the vernacular tongues as media for communicating results of observation and research. The defeat of Germany in World War I ushered in a decline in the relative importance of German in chemistry and other scientific fields. Perhaps English will manage to achieve the universal acceptance which Latin was unable to maintain even within the confines of Europe, and which German only temporarily and to a limited degree attained. Rapidly increasing interest in science, technology, and industry in the heavily populated countries of the orient, may prove in our day to be an insuperable barrier to the universal adoption of English. In those