Today in 1954, IBM and Georgetown University demonstrated automatic translation of more than sixty Russian sentences into English, the first public demonstration of machine translation.
John Hutchins, “The first public demonstration of machine translation: the Georgetown-IBM system, 7th January 1954”:
It was in 1951 at MIT that the first appointment of a MT [machine translation] researcher was made: Yehoshua Bar-Hillel in MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics directed by Jerome B. Wiesner. His primary task was to survey the prospects… and to promote development in the field; in particular to convene the first MT conference… All those known to be active or interested at the time – still a very small number – were invited to the conference at MIT in June 1952…
At the close of the conference there was a discussion about the next steps. It was agreed that sources of financing had to be explored, and Duncan Harkin of the US Department of Defense believed that his department and probably other US agencies would be forthcoming with funds for projects…
[Leon Dostert, head of Georgetown’s Institute of Languages and Linguistics at the University’s School of Foreign Service] admitted that he had gone to the conference as a sceptic regarding the automation of translation, but by the end he had become convinced of the real possibilities. On leaving the conference, he came to the conclusion that “rather than attempt to resolve theoretically a rather vast segment of the problem, it would be more fruitful to make an actual experiment, limited in scope but significant in terms of broader implications.”…
For obvious political reasons Dostert decided that the demonstration should translate from Russian into English… the enemy was no longer German but Russian, and the lack of knowledge about activities in the Soviet Union was already a matter of major concern…
All the newspaper reports repeated predictions that machine translation would be a major facilitator of international communication in the near future.
It is expected by IBM and Georgetown University, which collaborated on this project, that within a few years there will be a number of “brains” translating all languages with equal aplomb and dispatch. (Kenny, Christian Science Monitor)
Scholars and scientists who worked on it believe that within a few years the system may greatly increase communication, particularly in technical subjects, by making translation quick, accurate and easy. (Plumb, New York Times)…
A persistent and unfortunate effect of the demonstration was the impression given to many observers outside the field of MT that fully automatic translation of good quality was much closer than in fact the case. It was an impression which was to last – in the minds of the general public and indeed with computer scientists outside the MT filed – for many years…
The results from MT research in the next 10 years were inevitably disappointing. As a consequence, the funders set up an investigation committee, the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC), to consider the prospects for MT. Its negative conclusions are now well known… the committee concluded that current MT systems were inadequate and uneconomic and that there was “no immediate or predictable prospect of useful machine translation”.
In “Demonstrating Why AI Can’t Do High-Quality Translation” (July 28, 2023), I wrote abut the organizer of the first machine translation conference:
By 1955… Bar-Hillel turned very pessimistic. In “A Demonstration of the Nonfeasibility of Fully Automatic High-Quality Translation” he wrote that high-quality translation by computers “is just a dream that will not come true in the foreseeable future.” The machine translation researchers that do not recognize the “practical futility of this aim,” wrote Bar-Hillel, misled their sponsors by “not being satisfied with a partly automated translation system whose principles are well understood today,” instead asking them to wait for “the real thing which was believed, and made to believe, to be just around the corner.”
Just around the corner, or as OpenAI said in a recent announcement, superintelligence AI, “the most impactful technology humanity has ever invented,” could arrive this decade and “could lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction.”