ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a critical overview of the major milestones in the history of translation technologies from the end of the Second World War to the present. The discussion focuses on the key events and turning points in chronological order and assesses their significance in the development of machine translation (MT) systems and computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools. The chapter starts with an account of the origins of MT and of the initial developments of the first pioneering rule-based systems in the mid-1950s. The quality of the output produced by these early systems was generally quite poor, which led to frequent setbacks and disappointments, but eventually resulted in more realistic expectations of MT and in more reasonable ways of using translation technologies. The discussion then focuses on the evolution that took place since the 1980s with the spread of personal computers into the workplace and people’s homes: this prepared the conditions for the subsequent massive circulation of multilingual information on the Internet, with the pressing need for translations supported by technology. Around the mid-1990s, there was a major shift to data-driven approaches in the development of MT systems; these eventually supplanted the classic rule-based architecture with the gradual improvement of output quality. The progress from the statistical to the state-of-the-art neural systems contributed to the popularity of MT among the general public for an ever-increasing range of language pairs, especially through free online services, but it also made MT viable for professional translators, especially those working on localisation projects, technical and specialised texts. The conclusion of the chapter considers the growing integration between MT and CAT tools that has been encouraged by the development and increasing availability of translation-oriented online platforms and cloud-based services that bring together the full array of translation technologies that can be used today.
