title: The Dostoevsky Machine in Georgetown: scientific translation in the Cold War.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: a Princeton University , New Jersey , USA.
authors.forename: Michael D
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Gordin
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence / Q000266:history*; D004219:District of Columbia; D049673:History, 20th Century; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D012586:Science / Q000266:history*; D014177:Translations