The Georgetown-IBM Experiment Demonstrated in January 1954

The public demonstration of a Russian-English machine translation system in New York in January 1954 – a collaboration of IBM and Georgetown University – caused a great deal of public interest and much controversy. Although a small-scale experiment of just 250 words and six ‘grammar’ rules it raised expectations of automatic systems capable of high quality translation in the near future. This paper describes the system, its background, its impact and its implications. 1 The impact On the 8th January 1954, the front page of the New York Times carried a report of a demonstration the previous day at the headquarters of International Business Machines (IBM) in New York under the headline “Russian is turned into English by a fast electronic translator”: A public demonstration of what is believed to be the first successful use of a machine to translate meaningful texts from one language to another took place here yesterday afternoon. This may be the cumulation of centuries of sea...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: AMTA
• Authors: W. John Hutchins
• Keywords: AMTA 2004, Georgetown University, Information Management, Machine Translation, Public Demonstration