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The first machine
The first known machine translation proposal was made in Estonia and involved a typewriter-translator. -
Georges Artsrouni
Georges Artsrouni patents a general-purpose device with many potential applications in France. He seems to have been working on the device since 1929. -
Peter Petrovich Troyanskii
Peter Petrovich Troyanskii is awarded an author's certificate (patent) for a proposal to use a mechanized dictionary for translation between languages. -
Academy of Sciences
Troyanskii approaches the Academy of Sciences in Russia with his proposal for machine translation, seeking to work with linguists. Discussions continue till 1944, but not much comes out of it. -
Warren Weaver
Warren Weaver, working for the Rockefeller Foundation in the United States, puts forward a proposal for machine translation based on information theory, successes of code breaking during the second world war and speculation about universal underlying principles of natural language. -
The Georgetown-IBM experiment
The Georgetown-IBM experiment, held at the IBM head office in New York City in the United States, offers the first public demonstration of machine translation. The system itself, however, is no more than what today would be called a "toy" system, having just 250 words and translating just 49 carefully selected Russian sentences into English, mainly in the field of chemistry. -
Yehoshua Bar-Hillel
In 1958, linguist Yehoshua Bar-Hillel travels around the world visiting machine translation centers to better understand the work they were doing. In 1959, he writes up a report (intended primarily for the US government) pointing out some key difficulties with machine translation that he believed might doom the efforts then underway. -
ALPAC
ALPAC publishes a report commissioned by the United States government. The report concludes that machine translation is more expensive, less accurate and slower than human translation, and that despite the expenses, machine translation is not likely to reach the quality of a human translator in the near future. The report causes a significant decline in government funding for machine translation in the US. -
Peter Toma
SYSTRAN is started by Peter Toma. -
Bernard Scott.
Logos is started by Bernard Scott. -
The METEO System
The METEO System, developed at the Université de Montréal, is installed in Canada to translate weather forecasts from English to French, and is translating close to 80,000 words per day or 30 million words per year until it is replaced by a competitor's system on 30 September 2001. -
Makoto Nagao
Makoto Nagao proposes example-based machine translation. The idea is to break down sentences into phrases (subsentential units) and learn the translations of those phrases using a corpus of examples. With enough phrases known, new sentences that combine existing phrases in a novel manner can be translated. -
Babel Fish
The world's first web translation tool, Babel Fish, is launched as a subdomain of the AltaVista search engine. The tool is created by Systran in collaboration with Digital Equipment Corporation. -
Google Translate
Google Translate is launched.