The Dostoevsky Machine in Georgetown: scientific translation in the Cold War

SUMMARY

Machine Translation (MT) is now ubiquitous in discussions of translation. The roots of this phenomenon — first publicly unveiled in the so-called ‘Georgetown-IBM Experiment’ on 9 January 1954 — displayed not only the technological utopianism still associated with dreams of a universal computer translator, but was deeply enmeshed in the political pressures of the Cold War and a dominating conception of scientific writing as both the goal of machine translation as well as its method. Machine translation was created, in part, as a solution to a perceived crisis sparked by the massive expansion of Soviet science. Scientific prose was also perceived as linguistically simpler, and so served as the model for how to turn a language into a series of algorithms. This paper follows the rise of the Georgetown program — the largest single program in the world — from 1954 to the (as it turns out, temporary) collapse of MT in 1964.

Notes

1 The full machine consisted of the 701 Analytic Control Unit, the 706 Electrostatic Storage Unit, the 711 Punched Card Reader, the 716 Alphabetical Printer, the 721 Punched Card Recorder, the 726 Magnetic Tape Readers and Recorders, the 731 Magnetic Drum Reader and Recorder, and a Power Supply and Distribution Box. Compared to today's machines, it had 9K of memory and could perform up to 16,000 operations a second. Today's machines can perform billions of operations per second, and have several orders of magnitude more memory. On computer hardware in this period, see Mina Rees, ‘Computers: 1954’, Scientific Monthly, 79, no. 2 (August 1954), 118–24; and Cuthbert C. Hurd, ‘Computer Development at IBM’, in A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century: A Collection of Essays, edited by N. Metropolis, J. Howlett, and Gian-Carlo Rota (New York, 1980), 389–418. For all Hurd's pride in the experiment, he got the name of his Georgetown collaborator wrong, naming him Professor Dorot (on 406).

2 Dostert quoted in W. Schweisheimer, ‘Language Translation by Electronic Computer’, Mechanical World (December 1955), 534–5 (534).

3 See, for example: Jacob Ornstein, ‘Mechanical Translation: New Challenge to Communication’, Science 122, no. 3173 (21 October 1955), 745–8; and ‘Language Translation by the Electronic “Brain”’, Science News-Letter 65, no. 4 (23 January 1954), 59. A full bibliography of the press accounts is available in W. John Hutchins, ‘The First Public Demonstration of Machine Translation: The Georgetown-IBM System, 7th January 1954, (March 2006)’, available at http://hutchinsweb.me.uk/GU-IBM-2005.pdf, accessed 16 September 2011.

4 For a full discussion of this trajectory, see Michael D. Gordin, Scientific Babel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2015), chapters 8–9. For a survey of the perceived crisis, which however does not emphasize language training as much as scientific training, see John Rudolph, Scientists in the Classroom: The Cold War Reconstruction of American Science Education (New York: Palgrave, 2002).

5 N. W. Baklanoff, ‘Scientific Russian’, Modern Language Journal, 32 (1948), 190–4 (191).

6 J. G. Tolpin, ‘Teaching of Scientific Russian’, American Slavic and East European Review, 4 (1945), 158–64 (158); and idem, ‘The Place of Russian Scientific Literature in Bibliographical Work’, Journal of Chemical Education, 21 (1944), 336–42 (336).

7 E. J. Crane, ‘Growth of Chemical Literature: Contributions of Certain Nations and the Effects of War’, Chemical & Engineering News 22 (1944), 1478–81, 1496 (1478, 1481 [quotation]). In fact, the number of Russian chemists grew by twenty-five times between 1875 and 1940, and they were increasingly productive, producing eighty times the quantity of publications. I. I. Zaslavskii, ‘Rol’ russkikh uchenykh v sozdanii mirovoi khimii’, Uspekhi khimii 13, no. 4 (1944), 328–35 (331).

8 Kurt Gingold, ‘Translation Pools — Ideal and Reality’, Journal of Chemical Documentation, 1, no. 2 (1961), 14–9 (14).

9 Advisory Panel on Scientific Information, Minutes of the First Meeting, 12 October 1953, National Science Foundation Records, National Archives and Record Administration, College Park, Maryland, RG 307, Box 18, Folder: Scientific Information Office: Advisory Panel on Scientific Information, (4). [Hereafter NSF Records.]

10 J. G. Tolpin, ‘Surveying Russian Technical Publications: A Brief Course’, Science 146, no. 3648 (27 November 1964), 1143–4 (1143).

11 Office of Scientific Information, International Exchange of Scientific Information, 2 November 1955, NSF Records, Box 18, Folder: Scientific Information; and NSF, The Second Annual Report: Fiscal Year 1952 (Washington, DC, 1952), 33. In fact, the Russian language barrier was cited in Vannevar Bush's original position paper calling for the organization: Bush, Science: The Endless Frontier (Washington, DC, 1945), 114.

12 Nikolai Krementsov, The Cure: A Story of Cancer and Politics from the Annals of the Cold War (Chicago, 2002), 131. On Stalin's personal commitment to technical linguistic debates at precisely this moment, see Ethan Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), chapter 5.

13 John Turkevich, ‘Science’, in American Research on Russia, edited by Harold H. Fisher (Bloomington, 1959), 103–12, on 105–6; idem, ‘Soviet Physics and Chemistry’, in Soviet Science, edited by Ruth C. Christman (Washington, DC, 1952), 70–9 (75).

14 Theodosius Dobzhansky, ‘Russian Genetics’, in Christman (note 13), 1–7 (6); J. R. Kline, ‘Soviet Mathematics’, in Theodosius Dobzhansky, ‘Russian Genetics’, in Christman (note 13), 80–4 (82–3).

15 Albert Parry, America Learns Russian: A History of the Teaching of the Russian Language in the United States (Syracuse, 1967), 50–8; Rudolf Sturm, ‘The Changing Aspects of Teaching Russian’, in The Study of Foreign Languages, edited by Joseph S. Roucek (New York, 1968), 170–83 (175).

16 Jacob Ornstein, ‘Structurally Oriented Texts and Teaching Methods since World War II: A Survey and Appraisal’, Modern Language Journal, 40 (1956), 213–22; idem, Slavic and East European Studies: Their Development and Status in the Western Hemisphere (Washington, DC, 1957), 9; Parry (note 15), 107.

17 Parry (note 15), 112, 130; Jacob Ornstein, ‘A Decade of Russian Teaching: Notes on Methodology and Textbooks’, Modern Language Journal, 35 (1951), 263–79 (263).

18 L. E. Dostert, Frederick D. Eddy, W. P. Lehmann, and Albert H. Markwardt, ‘Tradition and Innovation in Language Teaching’, Modern Language Journal, 44 (1960), 220–6 (220).

19 William B. Edgerton, ‘A Modest Proposal: The Teaching of Russian in America’, Slavic and East European Journal, 6 (1962), 354–72 (357). On rising enrollments, see Sturm (note 15), 179; and David C. Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts (New York, 2009), 83.

20 Alan T. Waterman, ‘Research and the Scholar’, remarks at the dedication of the Price Gilbert Library at the Georgia Institute of Technology, 20 November 1953, Alan T. Waterman Papers, Library of Congress, Manuscripts and Special Collections, Box 57, Folder: 1953 Apr.8–Dec.29, p. 13.

21 Jacob Chaitkin, ‘The Challenge of Scientific Russian’, Scientific Monthly, 60 (1945), 301–6 (301).

22 George A. Znamensky, Elementary Scientific Russian Reader (New York, 1944), v.

23 Tolpin, ‘Teaching’ (note 6), 160.

24 Lorraine T. Kapitanoff, ‘The Teaching of Technical Russian’, Slavic and East European Journal, 7 (1963), 51–6 (52).

25 David Kaiser, ‘The Physics of Spin: Sputnik Politics and American Physicists in the 1950s’, Social Research, 73 (2006), 1225–52 (1239–40); Parry (note 15), 146; Arthur Prudden Coleman, A Report on the Status of Russian and Other Slavic and East European Languages in the Educational Institutions of the United States, Its Territories, Possessions and Mandates, with Additional Data on Similar Studies in Canada and Latin America (New York, 1948).

26 J. G. Tolpin, ‘The Present Status of Teaching Russian for Scientists’, Modern Language Journal, 33 (1949), 27–30 (27). For self-training, see James W. Perry, ‘Chemical Russian, Self-Taught’, Journal of Chemical Education, 28 (1944), 393–398.

27 E. F. Langley, ‘New Course in Russian’, 8 September 1942, MIT Archives, AC359, Box 1, Folder 1.

28 Baklanoff (note 5); R. D. Burke, ‘Some Unique Problems in the Development of Qualified Translators of Scientific Russian’, RAND Report P-1698 (12 May 1959); Tolpin (note 10), 1143. The quotation comes from Morton Hamermesh to Elmer Hutchisson, 5 December 1956, Niels Bohr Library, Center for the History of Physics, College Park, Maryland, Hutchisson Records 13:30. [Hereafter NBL.]

29 Jacob Ornstein, Slavic and East European Studies: Their Development and Status in the Western Hemisphere (Washington, DC, 1957), 21–2.

30 For example, James W. Perry, Scientific Russian: A Textbook for Classes and Self-Study (New York, 1950); idem, Chemical Russian, Self-Taught (Easton, PA, 1948); Noah D. Gershevsky, ed., Scientific Russian Reader: Selected Modern Readings in Chemistry and Physics (New York, 1948); George E. Condoyannis, Scientific Russian: A Concise Description of the Structural Elements of Scientific and Technical Russian (New York, 1959); John Turkevich and Ludmilla B. Turkevich, Russian for the Scientist (Princeton, 1959); C. R. Buxton and H. Sheldon Jackson, Russian for Scientists: A Grammar and Reader (New York, 1960); and V. A. Pertzoff, Translation of Scientific Russian (New York, [1964]).

31 Biographical information is drawn from: R. Ross Macdonald, ‘Léon Dostert’, in Papers in Linguistics in Honor of Léon Dostert, edited by William M. Austin (The Hague, 1967), 9–14; ‘New Institute of Linguistics’, Georgetown University Alumni Bulletin (Fall 1949), 5, 16; The Lado Years, 1960–1973 (Washington, DC, 1973), 1–2; and Muriel Vasconcellos, ‘The Georgetown Project and Léon Dostert: Recollections of a Young Assistant’, in Early Years in Machine Translation: Memoirs and Biographies of Pioneers, edited by W. John Hutchins (Amsterdam, 2000), 87–96.

32 Francesca Gaiba, The Origins of Simultaneous Interpretation: The Nuremberg Trial (Ottawa, 1998). On the relationship with Watson, see Vasconcellos (note 31), 87n. This explains how Dostert would later manage to persuade IBM to donate so much time on a valuable machine (estimated at not less than $15 000) to his venture. Estimate from Léon Dostert, ‘Report on Academic Developments, The Institute of Languages and Linguistics, 1952–53, Projected Activities, 1953–54’, 7 October 1953, Georgetown University Archives, School of Languages and Linguistics [hereafter GUA-SLL], 1:1953. I am grateful to Georgetown University Archives for permission to quote from these materials.

33 L. E. Dostert, ‘Languages in Preparedness: Link or Obstacle?’, Armor (May-June 1951), 12–4 (13).

34 Reprinted as Warren Weaver, ‘Translation’, in Machine Translation of Languages: Fourteen Essays, edited by William N. Locke and A. Donald Booth (Cambridge, MA, 1955), 15–23 (18).

35 Quoted in Weaver (note 34), 18.

36 Quoted in A. Donald Booth and William N. Locke, ‘Historical Introduction’, in Locke and Booth (note 34), 1–14 (4).

37 For the program, see ‘M.I.T. Conference on Mechanical Translation, June 17 – June 20, 1952 Program’, MIT Archives, AC359, Box 2, Folder: Machine Translation Conf.-1952. This conference immediately followed one on electronic speech analysis, the other technological-linguistic hybrid that occupied MIT's marginalized Department of Modern Languages during the 1950s.

38 Bar-Hillel, ‘Some Linguistic Problems Connected with Machine Translation’, Philosophy of Science, 20 (1953), 217–25; idem, ‘Machine Translation’, Computers and Automation, 2, no. 5 (1953), 1–6; idem, ‘Can Translation Be Mechanized?’, American Scientist, 42 (1954), 248–60; and idem, ‘The Present State of Research on Mechanical Translation’, American Documentation, 2 (1951), 229–37.

39 Léon Dostert, ‘Development Plan for the Institute of Languages and Linguistics, 1953–1958’, 31 December 1952, GUA-SLL 1:1952.

40 A. C. Reynolds, Jr., ‘The Conference on Mechanical Translation Held at M.I.T., June 17–20, 1952’, Mechanical Translation, 1, no. 3 (1954), 47–55 (48).

41 Dostert, ‘The Georgetown-I.B.M. Experiment’, in Locke and Booth (note 34), 124–35 (125).

42 Erwin Reifler, ‘The First Conference on Mechanical Translation’, Mechanical Translation, 1, no. 2 (1954), 23–32, (27, 31 [quotation]).

43 Erwin Reifler, ‘The Mechanical Determination of Meaning’, in Locke and Booth (note 34), 136–64 (136).

44 Victor A. Oswald, Jr., and Stuart L. Fletcher, Jr., ‘Proposals for the Mechanical Resolution of German Syntax Patterns’, Modern Languages Forum, 36 (1951), 81–104.

45 Kenneth Harper, ‘The Mechanical Translation of Russian: A Preliminary Study’, Modern Language Forum, 38, no. 3–4 (1953), 12–29 (12). For the Soviet view of the same issue, see I. K. Belskaja, ‘Machine Translation of Languages’, Research, 10 (1957), 383–9 (383).

46 Regrettably, we have no detailed description of how the experiment actually worked, much less a copy of the computer code — at least I was unable to uncover anything like this in the thirteen boxes of (completely unsorted) machine-translation papers at the Georgetown University Archives [hereafter GUA-MTP]. The closest is Paul Garvin's April 1953 articulation of his plan of attack: ‘Statement of Opinion Concerning Machine Translation’, 14 April 1953, GUA-MTP. Historical accounts must rely on the rather vague presentation in Dostert (note 41) and the more technical but retrospective 1967 presentation by Garvin, ‘The Georgetown-IBM Experiment of 1954: An Evaluation in Retrospect’, in Austin (note 31), 46–56. The best available reconstruction (although still speculative) is Hutchins (note 3).

47 Dostert, ‘An Experiment in Mechanical Translation: Aspects of the General Problem’, August 1954, GUA-SLL 1:7–12/1954, p.7.

48 Peter Sheridan, ‘Research in Language Translation on the IBM Type 701’, IBM Technical Newsletter, 9 (1955), 5–24 (5). See also Garvin (note 46), 50.

49 Sheridan (note 48), 17.

50 Michael Zarechnak, ‘The Early Days of GAT-SLC’, in Hutchins (note 31), 111–28 (112); and Zarechnak, ‘The History of Machine Translation’, in Machine Translation, edited by Bożena Henisz-Dostert, R. Ross Macdonald, and Michael Zarechnak (The Hague, 1979), 1–87 (24).

51 Undated 2-page typescript, entitled ‘A Sample of Russian Sentences translated by the IBM Type-701 Data Processing Machines, together with the English translations’, GUA-SLL 1:1–6/1954.

52 Léon E. Dostert to Director of the Mathematical Sciences Division at the office of the Chief of Naval Research, 25 May 1954, GUA-SLL 1:1–6/1954; Rear Admiral and Navy Chief of Staff L. H. Frost to Edward B. Bunn SJ, 21 July 1954, GUA-SLL 1:7–12/1954.

53 L. E. Dostert, ‘Outline for Extension of Research on Mechanical Translation’, 6 July 1954, GUA-SLL 1:7–12/1954.

54 V. P. Berkov and B. A. Ershov, ‘O popytkakh mashinnogo perevoda’, Voprosy iazykoznaniia, no. 6 (November-December 1955), 145–8. On the visit to New York, see Hurd (note 1), 406. On Liapunov's group, see A. I. Mikhailov, A. I. Chernyi, and R. S. Giliarevskii, Osnovy nauchnoi informatsii (Moscow, 1965), 242–3; and Olga S. Kulagina, ‘Pioneering MT in the Soviet Union’, in Hutchins (note 31), 197–204 (197). On Soviet cybernetics, see Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (Cambridge, MA, 2002).

55 D. Panov, I. Mukhin, and I. Bel'skaia, ‘Mashina perevodit s odnogo iazyka na drugoi’, Pravda, no. 22 (13685) (22 January 1956), 4.

56 Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, Language and Information: Selected Essays on Their Theory and Application (Reading, MA, 1964), 181. For surveys of Soviet research in this period, see Belskaja (note 45); Kenneth E. Harper, ‘Soviet Research in Machine Translation’, in Proceedings of the National Symposium on Machine Translation: Held at the University of California, Los Angeles, February 2–5, 1960, edited by H. P. Edmundson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1961), 2–12; Anthony G. Oettinger, ‘A Survey of Soviet Work on Automatic Translation’, Mechanical Translation, 5, no. 3 (December 1958), 101–10; and W. J. Hutchins, Machine Translation: Past, Present, Future (Chichester, 1986), chapter 6.

57 G. P. Zelenkevich, L. N. Korolev, and S. P. Razumovskii, ‘Opyty avtomaticheskogo perevoda na elektronnoi vychislitel'noi mashine BESM’, Priroda, no. 8 (1956), 81–5 (82).

58 Sylvie Archaimbault and Jacqueline Léon, ‘La langue intermédiaire dans la traduction automatique en URSS (1954–1960)’, Histoire Épistémologie Langage, 19, no. 2 (1997), 105–32.

59 L. E. Dostert, ‘Certain Aspects and Objectives of Research in Machine Translation’, undated [1957], GUA-MTP, 2–3. See also Leon Dostert, ‘Brief History of Machine Translation Research’, in Eighth Annual Round Table Meeting on Linguistics and Language Studies (Washington, DC, 1957), 3–10 (4).

60 Oettinger, ‘Machine Translation at Harvard’, in Hutchins (note 31), 73–86 (80).

61 Zarechnak (note 50), 113.

62 L. E. Dostert to Alberto Thompson, 17 April 1956, GUA-SLL, 1:1–4/1956. Emphasis in original.

63 James Clayton, ‘Device to Translate Foreign Science Data’, Washington Post and Times Herald (30 July 1956), 19.

64 Vasconcellos (note 31), 88. See the year-by-year breakdown by funding agency and scholarly institution in Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (hereafter ALPAC), Language and Machines: Computers in Translation and Linguistics (Washington, DC, 1966), 107–10; and R. Ross Macdonald, General Report, 1952–1963 (Washington, DC, 1963), v. On publicity, see ‘Machine Translation Tests Are Sponsored by CIA’, Georgetown Record, 11, no. 4 (January 1962), 1.

65 US House of Representatives, Committee on Science and Astronautics, Research on Mechanical Translation, 86th Congress, second session, Serial d, House Report No. 2021 (Washington, DC, 1960), 11–2.

66 Dr. S. Glazer, ‘Article Requirements of Plural Nouns in Russian Chemistry Texts’, Seminar Work Paper MT-42, 1957, GUA-MTP.

67 Dostert, ‘Georgetown University Machine Translation Project: Proposal for Extension and Expansion of Research, 1961–1962’, 1 December 1959, GUA-SLL 1:1959; Macdonald (note 69), 212; Brown (note 71), 131–2.

68 Martin Kay, ‘Automatic Translation of Natural Languages’, Daedalus, 102 (1973), 217–30 (218–9).

69 Dostert (note 41), 124n.

70 Oettinger (note 60), 79.

71 Andrew D. Booth and Kathleen H. V. Booth, ‘The Beginnings of MT’, in Hutchins (note 31), 253–61 (255). Hutchins, in an editorial footnote, corrects the misconception. On Lukjanow, see Hutchins (note 3), 29n54.

72 Peter Toma, ‘From SERNA to SYSTRAN’, in Hutchins (note 31), 135–45 (138). For Lehmann, see the quotation in Vasconcellos (note 31), 91.

73 Section 901 of Public Law 85–864, quoted in US House of Representatives (note 65), 3.

74 Victor H. Yngve, ‘Early Research at M.I.T.: In Search of Adequate Theory’, in Hutchins (note 31), 39–72 (50–51).

75 On the history of cover-to-cover translation, see Kaiser (note 25); and A. Tybulewicz, ‘Cover-to-Cover Translations of Soviet Scientific Journals’, Aslib Proceedings, 22 (1970), 55–62 (56). The work was often outsourced abroad, with several NSF sponsored publications produced through foreign-currency exchange programs, such as a series of Russian journals translated by the Israel Program for Scientific Translations (IPST), founded in 1959, a decade after Coleman's venture and at the peak of American enthusiasm for this publishing option.

76 Dostert (note 59), 7.

77 Bar-Hillel, ‘The Present Status of Automatic Translation of Languages’, Advances in Computing, 1 (1960), 91–163 (109, 94, 135).

78 Edward B. Bunn SJ to Rev. Brian A. McGrath SJ and Deans and Regents of Various Schools, 23 September 1959, GUA-SLL 1:1959.

79 Jonathan Slocum, ‘A Survey of Machine Translation: Its History, Current Status, and Future Prospects’, Computational Linguistics 11, no. 1 (1985),1–17 (4). See also Kay (note 68), 219.

80 W. J. Hutchins, ‘Machine Translation and Machine-Aided Translation’, Journal of Documentation, 34, no. 2 (June 1978), 119–59 (126).

81 The evaluator's verdict: ‘In brief, the translation can be understood by a chemist thoroughly familiar with the subject under discussion. A competent chemist can from a study of the chemical formulas, reconstruct many of the chemical terms which appear to be a cross between a translation and a transliteration.’ Quoted in US House of Representatives (note 65), 48.

82 Vasconcellos (note 31), 94–5.

83 Ross Macdonald assumed control of the Georgetown program, and it was reintegrated with the Institute of Languages and Linguistics. ‘MT Research at Georgetown’, The Finite String, 2, no. 6 (June 1965), 4.

84 ALPAC (note 64), iii, 16, 23–4.

85 Kay (note 68); Slocum (note 79), 1. See also Zarechnak (note 50), 57, 86.

86 William N. Locke, ‘Machine Translation’, in Subject and Information Analysis, edited by Eleanor D. Dym (New York, 1985), 124–153 (137).

87 Igor A. Mel'čuk, ‘Machine Translation and Formal Linguistics in the USSR’, in Hutchins (note 31), 204–26 (221). On the negative international ramifications of ALPAC, which seemed to exclude only France, see Hutchins (note 56), 167.

88 Quoted in ‘Hurdling the Language Barrier’, Chemical & Engineering News, 32 (1954), 5158–5159 (5158).

89 Robert T. Beyer, ‘Hurdling the Language Barrier’, Physics Today (January 1965), 46–52 (48, 50).

90 On the vast topic of global English in the sciences, see Gordin (note 4); The Dominance of English as a Language of Science: Effects on Other Languages and Language Communities, edited by Ulrich Ammon (Berlin, 2001); and Scott L. Montgomery, Does Science Need a Global Language?: English and the Future of Research (Chicago, 2013).