Machine Translation in Western Europe: a Survey

Although work on machine translation in western Europe developed somewhat later than that in the Soviet Union and the United States, for a time it was equally prominent. Projects were undertaken in many countries. For some, i.e. Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy and Sweden, at one time eight to fifteen research groups could be listed; for others, such as The Netherlands and Switzerland, fewer. Though some projects were carried out in close cooperation with projects in the United States, the greater part of the European research groups preserved their independence both with respect to linguistic theory and their methodology. In contrast with the American groups, which generally excluded the semantic component of language, the research groups at Cambridge, Milan, and Bonn took the semantic component into consideration. Moreover, while the larger research groups in the United States developed general analyzers that could process the grammar of any language, the research groups in western Europe, except that in Grenoble, developed language-dependent algorithms, which could process only a particular language. Most of the European groups believed that high quality translation was not obtainable within a short time. Yet some set out to produce machine translation in a short time, reducing their requirements for quality. A few simply aimed to construct multilingual dictionaries for use in machine-aided translation. These groups reacted variously to the report of the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC) of the National Research Council, which appeared in 1966. The report stated that large-scale support of machine translation research could not be justified on the grounds that machine translation was slower, less accurate, and more costly than that provided by human translators. Moreover, the report concluded that there had been no satisfactory machine translation of scientific texts and that none could be expected soon. On the other hand, the report recommended federal support for research and development for human and machine-aided trans-