The example-based approach to MT is becoming increasingly popular. However, such is the variety of techniques and methods used that it is difficult to discern the overall conception of what example-based machine translation (EBMT) is and/or what its practitioners conceive it to be. Although definitions of MT systems are notoriously complex, an attempt is made to define EBMT in contrast to other MT architectures (RBMT and SMT).

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.

The common assertion that MT systems have improved over the last decades is examined by informal comparisons of translations produced by operational systems in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s and of translations of the same source texts produced by some currently available commercial and online systems. The scarcity of source and target texts for earlier systems means that the conclusions are consequently tentative and preliminary.

At the last MT Summit conference this century, this paper looks back briefly at what has happened in the 50 years since MT began, reviews the present situation, and speculates on what the future may bring. Progress in the basic processes of computerized translation has not been as dramatic as developments in computer technology and software. There is still much scope for the improvement of the linguistic quality of MT output, which hopefully developments in both rule-based and corpus-based methods can bring. Greater impact on the future MT scenario will probably come from the expected huge increase in demand for on-line real-time communication in many languages, where quality may be less important than accessibility and usability.

Although the first ideas for mechanical translation were made in the seventeenth century, it was not until this century that means became available for realization with the appearance of the electronic computer in the mid 1940s. Fifty years ago, in March 1947 Warren Weaver wrote to Norbert Wiener and met Andrew Booth, mentioning to both the use of computers for translation. The possibilities were investigated during the next seven years, until in January 1954 the first prototype program was demonstrated. This article is a brief chronicle of these early years of mechanizing translation processes.