In 1964, the U.S. Government established the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC) to evaluate the progress of Computational Linguistics and the potentials of Machine Translation (MT). After two years of research, the seven scientists-Committee issues its famous report questioning the results achieved in the field of MT and calling for more research in Computational Linguistics. The recommendations of the Committee led the U.S. Government to reduce seriously its funding.
This was a huge blow for this 10 years old emerging science. Ever since, MT had difficulties getting back on its feet. But MT advocates didn't loose hope and the research continued.
In September 1301, the king of Aragon, James II, wrote urgently to his treasurer commanding him to get the royal Librum medicine vocatum Avicenne out of pawn. He had allowed his favourite surgeon to pawn the volume with a Barcelona merchant for 500 sueldos, but now he found a "valda necessarium" and had to have it back. Five hundred sueldos was an enormous amount, the price of fifty meters of Persian cloth, of a good mule or of a horse and not even the royal treasury always found such sums easy to produce.
The king had to repeat his order for the book's redemption for months to come. This volume, on which the king placed so much store, can only have been Avicenna's Canon, the great medical encyclopaedia of Ibn Sina, translated into Latin in the twelfth century.*
Any piece of text you put on the web automatically becomes available for the readers. Traditional web readers used to be you, me and all the people around us; but it is not the case anymore.
Now you have to expect that your pages are read by other "creatures" which are looking for your thoughts and products.
We are not talking about aliens here, but about new type of "eyes" scanning your site. The fact that your site is findable on the web means that something came to your site and brought it to the surface; this is no new information, everyone now knows what a "search engine" does. But what is news is the fact that there is a very fast growing monster invading the web and it is being unfortunately ignored completely: Online Machine Translation Systems!
Thirty years ago, linguists, anthropologists and many scholars from different disciplines were anxiously discussing ways to slow down the rhythm in which many languages are vanishing. English language had invaded since decades many parts of the world as the language of education, business and communication.
Translation is the complex process of transferring the components of a message from one language and culture into another language and culture. These components can be in the form of "language" (most of the time) or colors, shapes, sounds, etc. For the transfer process to succeed, all ingredients of the original message should be clear and well defined.
