Example A14.1

The police refused the students a permit because they feared violence.

The first real developments in Machine Translation (MT) took place after the Second World War, during which the first computers had been invented in the UK by Alan Turing’s team as part of the now famous code-breaking operation at Bletchley Park (Hinsley and Stripp 1993). The beginning of the Cold War in the late 1940s prompted significant investment by the US government in automatic Russian–English translation systems for the military; France, Japan, the UK and the USSR had smaller programs. These first-generation systems were known as ‘direct’ systems since they were basically word-based ‘direct- replacement’ systems; each ST word would be looked up and replaced by a corresponding TL term. As we have seen in Unit 2, word-for-word substitution is not a solid base for translation. Without significant progress, MT’s reputation fell very low in the 1960s following damning criticism by Yehoshua Bar-Hillel in his Report on the State of Machine Translation in the United States and Great Britain (1959) and in the report published in 1966 by the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC). Instead the focus shifted to more basic questions of language processing, the field that became known as computational linguistics.

From Korunets: