Machine Translation Essay

This article is basically about the role of technology in the profession of translation. The author tries to answer some questions and doubts that arise in the field of MT. There are some people who are fascinated by technology, while others do not trust a world where machines will rule. But whatever our personal opinions might be, we cannot deny the fact that technology is a part of our lives now and everyone is affected by it in some way or the other. And since translation is an industrial product as well as a process, it has to adapt with the new requirements of today's world. Therefore, professional translators are forced to start working with computers even if they don't want to.
Some 2000 years ago, Aristotle and the whole of mankind had dreamed of a day when some kind of a man-made tool would take over and accomplish all our daily work. And finally after centuries, computers seem to have fulfilled our dreams and there is no doubt that they are here to stay. The author then briefly talks about the history of computers.
The first computer was invented in 1945. Two physicists and a mathematician from the University of Pennsylvania created ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), which was more of an electronic calculator than what we call a computer nowadays. It was huge and weighed more than 30 tons! It had thousands of switches and resistors, and a lot of time was spent in operating it. These computers were unreliable since they resulted in frequent errors and failures. Then, around 1960, the first transistor and the integrated circuit were invented. That is when we had little faster and more reliable computers, but they were still too big, expensive and were too complex to operate. Therefore, they were mainly used by scientists and did not make any difference to the life of the common man since he never had access to them.
The computer was revolutionized in the 1970s when the microprocessor was invented. This was basically an integrated circuit which incorporates all the functions of a CPU on a single chip. That is when the microcomputer was born more storage capacity, new programming languages, faster processors and highly sophisticated software which made it more user-friendly on the whole. And the final step today is the Internet, which was conceived in the 1950s by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA). The Internet, as we all know, interconnects the entire world.
Very soon, people wanted to start using computers to translate. In 1949, Warren Weaver used statistics and cryptographic techniques to mechanize the process of translation. What is cryptology? It is basically the practice and study of hiding information. Applications of cryptography include ATM cards and computer passwords. The goal of machine translation (MT) was to be able to create fully automatic high-quality translation systems which would produce results that are as good as human translators. Soon, they realised that language was more complex than they had thought.