ABSTRACT

To begin with, the notion of computer translation is not new. Shortly after the Second World War, at a time when no one dreamt that word processors, spreadsheets, or drawing programs would be widely available, some of the computer’s prime movers, Turing, Weaver and Booth among them, were already beginning to think about translation.1 They saw this application mainly as a natural outgrowth of their wartime code-breaking work, which had helped to defeat the enemy, and it never occurred to them to doubt that computer translation was a useful and realizable goal.