TechGist05

This is a reprint of a post published on the SDL website and closely related to a previous post on the difficulties and challenges of building Russian to English MT systems.  Many may not be aware that several in the SDL MT team have very significant research and development credentials, and have pioneered the data-driven approaches to MT system development. They initially commercialized Statistical MT and the members of the original research team read like a Who's Who in the MT research community. The original principals at Google MT and the developer of Moses both come from the original Language Weaver team and today you will see members of the original team have a hand in every major MT initiative in the US.  The SDL MT team also has the unique experience of working closely with linguists and translators on a long-term basis and thus have unique exposure to ongoing human MT quality assessments for most of the systems they build.  In localization use case scenarios MT...

When we consider the history of machine translation, the science by which computers automatically translate from one human language to another, we see that much of the science starts with Russian. One of the earliest mentions of automated translation involves Russian Peter Troyanskii who submitted a proposal that included both the bilingual dictionary and a method for dealing with grammatical roles between languages, based on the grammatical system of Esperanto , even before computers were available. The first set of proposals for computer-based machine translation was presented in 1949 by Warren Weaver , a researcher at the Rockefeller Foundation in his now famous " Translation memorandum ". In the famous memorandum referenced here, he said: “it is very tempting to say that a book written in Russian is simply a book written in English which was coded into the Russian code.” These proposals were based on information theory , successes in code-breaking during the Second Wo...