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<Paper uid="J85-1001">
  <Title>A SURVEY OF MACHINE TRANSLATION: ITS HISTORY, CURRENT STATUS, AND FUTURE PROSPECTS</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Machine Translation (MT) of natural human languages is not a subject about which most scholars feel neutral.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> This field has had a long, colorful career, and boasts no shortage of vociferous detractors and proponents alike.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> During its first decade in the 1950s, interest and support was fueled by visions of high-speed high-quality translation of arbitrary texts (especially those of interest to the military and intelligence communities, who funded MT projects quite heavily). During its second decade in the 1960s, disillusionment crept in as the number and difficulty of the linguistic problems became increasingly obvious, and as it was realized that the translation problem was not nearly so amenable to automated solution as had been thought. The climax came with the delivery of the National Academy of Sciences ALPAC report in 1966, condemning the field and, indirectly, its workers alike.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The ALPAC report was criticized as narrow, biased, and short-sighted, but its recommendations were adopted (with the important exception of increased expenditures for long-term research in computational linguistics), and as a result MT projects were cancelled in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world. By 1973, the early part of the third decade of MT, only three government-funded projects were left in the U.S., and by late 1975 there were none. Paradoxically, MT systems were still being used by various government agencies here and abroad, because there was simply no alternative means of gathering information from foreign \[Russian\] sources so quickly; in addition, private companies were developing and selling MT systems based on the mid-60s technology so roundly castigated by ALPAC. Nevertheless the general disrepute of MT resulted in a remarkably quiet third decade.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> We are now into the fourth decade of MT, and there is a resurgence of interest throughout the world - plus a growing number of MT and MAT (Machine-aided Translation) systems in use by governments, business and industry: in 1984 approximately half a million pages of text were translated by machine. Industrial firms are also beginning to fund M(A)T R&amp;D projects of their own; thus it can no longer be said that only government funding keeps the field alive (indeed, in the U.S. there is no government funding, though the Japanese and European governments are heavily subsidizing MT R&amp;D). In part this interest is due to more realistic expectations of what is possible in MT, and realization that MT can be very useful though imperfect; but it is also true that the capabilities of the newer MT systems lie well beyond what was possible just one decade ago.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> In light of these events, it is worth reconsidering the potential of, and prospects for, Machine Translation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Copyright1985 by the Association for Computational Linguistics. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made for direct commercial advantage and the CL reference and this copyright notice are included on the first page. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission.  After opening with an explanation of how \[human\] translation is done where it is taken seriously, we present a brief introduction to MT technology and a short historical perspective before considering the ,present status arid state of the art, and then moving on to a discussion of the future prospects. For reasons of space and perspicuity, we shall concentrate on MT efforts in the U.S. and western Europe, though some other MT projects and less-ambitious approaches will receive attention.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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