Second decade of machine translation

In 1951 the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) put one of its specialists, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, to work full-time on MT (Machine Translation). A year later, the first TA symposium was organized, with topics such as controlled languages, sublanguages, the need for syntax, or the possibility of dispensing with human intervention. The first public demonstration of an automatic translator was carried out in 1954, at Georgetown University, with the help of International Business Machines (IBM) and the participation of researcher Leon Dostert. 49 Russian sentences were carefully selected and translated into English with a vocabulary of 250 words and 6 grammar rules. The demonstration's media success was notable and in the United States significant budget allocations (the majority provided by the Ministry of Defense) were dedicated to translating from Russian, French and German. It was a moment of initial euphoria, which led to the goal of fully automatic high quality translation (FAHQT). Among the pioneering developments of that decade, it is worth highlighting those of the universities of Georgetown and Texas, where the bases of two systems that still survive, SYSTRAN and METAL, were established.