
Can anyone help me find a thorough and up-to-date history of machine translation and computer-assisted translation? Beyond the book described below, I can only find short summaries of a general nature, and I would like one that includes names of pioneers, a timetable of breakthroughs, etc. A good summary can be found at the Translation Journal, a publication maintained by the AccuRapid Language Service. I applaud authors Olivia Craciunescu, Constanza Gerding-Salas, and Susan Stringer-O'Keeffe for the article.
I worked as a "disambiguator" for a machine translation project at Brigham Young University in the late 1970s. The project later left campus and became a private effort known as the Automated Language Processing System (ALPS). At that time, it was thought that most of the translating could be done by machine if the source language were first broken down into unambiguous mathematical "codes" or 'trees" or strings that would then be matched by the computer to the best equivalent strings in the target language(s). Project team members were trained in Junction Grammar, a deep-structure grammar developed by Eldon Lytle, a professor of linguistics at BYU. Those were great days! Being paid to contemplate the inner and hidden workings of language!
The project is described in "Machine Translation: past, present, future" (ISBN: 0-470-20313-7) by John Hutchins. This book was first published in 1986 but has been updated by footnotes and bibliographic references to 2003. The text is available online through Hutchins' webpage, along with dozens of others that he has written on the topic. This book alone is very thorough and unbiased. I'mm just wondering if anything similar has been published.





Have you looked at the entries at wikipedia.com?
This one is for Machine Translation and this one is for Computer Assisted Translation.
If they don't have it right or complete there, maybe you could enhance the entry!
Posted by: Tim Stay | December 15, 2005 12:05 PM | Permalink to Comment