Multi- and bilinguals UN (6 languages), EU (23) Many languages are endangered
First idea in 1930s by French and Russian scientists Case of Enigma and translation is like decoding First translation in 1954 in USA – from Russian to English (word by word “brute force”) IBM 701 Supervening social necessity – military, intelligence
METEO provides weather forecasts in French and English for the whole of Canada. Starting at 7,500 words a day in 1977 New market disruptive innovation Reaching non-consumers
New research centers in USA, including UW – high expectations ALPAC - the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee – silent years New PC and new wave of MT development
Development of Internet from 1990s and growth of information flows as supervening social necessity New method – statistical MT (finding analogues in bilingual documents) AltaVista Babelfish (rule based), and later Google Translate (statistical translation)
Supervening social necessity – growth of Internet and information volume and migration, tourism Language disbalance among users and content Hundreds of millions of Arabic speakers, only about 1% of the text on the Web is in that language
Future: - mobile translation speech translation cyborg translation
