Abstract
Machine Translation (MT) is now ubiquitous in discussions of translation. The roots of this phenomenon — first publicly unveiled in the so-called ‘Georgetown-IBM Experiment’ on 9 January 1954 — displayed not only the technological utopianism still associated with dreams of a universal computer translator, but was deeply enmeshed in the political pressures of the Cold War and a dominating conception of scientific writing as both the goal of machine translation as well as its method. Machine translation was created, in part, as a solution to a perceived crisis sparked by the massive expansion of Soviet science. Scientific prose was also perceived as linguistically simpler, and so served as the model for how to turn a language into a series of algorithms. This paper follows the rise of the Georgetown program — the largest single program in the world — from 1954 to the (as it turns out, temporary) collapse of MT in 1964.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 208-223 |
Number of pages | 16 |
Journal | Annals of Science |
Volume | 73 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Apr 2 2016 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- History and Philosophy of Science