In the past, machine translation was often inaccurate and produced text that was difficult to understand. However, modern machine translation systems are much more accurate and can produce translations that are almost indistinguishable from those produced by human translators.
From just 260 words to billions per day, the inventors of machine translation could have never imagined expansion and commercial use of today’s level in the 1950s. However, it is impossible to recognize the value of these numbers without knowing the history.
Let’s explore the history of machine language translation to get hungary mobile database a better understanding of how it works and perhaps, a deeper appreciation for how far we’ve come.
Rules-Based Machine Translation & The “Electronic Brain” 1950-1979
On January 8, 1954, the headline of IBM press release read: “Russian was translated into English by an electronic "brain" today for the first time.” The release went on to detail the first rules-based machine translation system developed by IBM.
Using six linguistic rules, it was able to translate 260 words between Russian and English and caused quite the sensation at the time. However, this computer translation was far from perfect.
The early machines were not viable. Researchers had to come up with extensive dictionaries as well as rules for structure & transformation. Still, it often produced inaccurate translations because it was impossible to come up with every rule.
Statistical Machine Translation & The Second Wave of Innovation 1980-1999
In the 1980’s, a research team at IBM collected audio recordings and attempted to make developments in the field of speech recognition. However, the results of their efforts were not what they had hoped. So, they began applying statistical methods to machine translation.