The trial translator: an automatic programming system for experimental Russian-English machine translation

Abstract

Grammatical and syntactic rules designed for the production of "smooth" automatic translations between human languages will be called translation algorithms. Because of the rigid constraints imposed by automatic machines, the formulation of translation algorithms involves unprecedented problems of a linguistic nature. Much of the existing literature in the field of machine translation consists of theoretical treatments of these problems, or of appropriately simplified abstractions from these problems. Several specific algorithms for the machine translation of Russian to English have been proposed, but none have been tested on a large scale. These rules are apparently based on the intuition and linguistic backgrounds of the individual writers, sometimes aided by the manual analysis of short text samples. Until very recently the use of automatic machines has been confined to the application of ad-hoc computer programs, tailored to the processing of particular sentences or carefully selected texts.