2014/06/17 by Michael D. Gordin · 34 citations
Social Sciences · #Biology #Classics #Cold war #Eastern European Communism and Reforms #Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics #History #Intelligence, Security, War Strategy #Law #Philosophy #Political science #Politics #Translation (biology)
paper · doi:10.1080/00033790.2014.917437
published in Annals of Science 73(2), 208-223 (Taylor & Francis)
openalex publication_date 2014/06/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
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.