Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
“mechanical” way, via the equations, but in reality his booklet offered
little more than a Latin vocabulary with a numerical notation.
The most detailed of the various intermediate languages proposed
around that time was the
Real Character
published by John Wilkins in
1668. Wilkins (1614-1672) was the Bishop of Chester, a founding
member of the Royal Society and one of the most influential British
thinkers of the seventeenth century. This essay was Wilkins' attempt at
creating a universal language. In it Wilkins maintained that because all
people's minds functioned in the same way and had a similar “appre-
hension of things”, it should be possible to cultivate a rational universal
language. Wilkins work was the most detailed attempt up till then to
construct a rational “universal” notation for common concepts, a pro-
posal for an intermediate-language. But it was not a method of automatic
translation.
Proposals for machines to perform dictionary consultation or trans-
lation did not come until the technological developments in the early
twentieth century. The earliest report of a translating machine is of a
model of a proposed typewriter-translator that was reputedly demon-
strated by an Estonian, A. Vakher, in February 1924. An article in the
Estonian newspaper
Vaba Maa
reported the “demonstration of a model
of a translating typewriter” by its inventor, who planned to develop a
prototype. The article was reproduced in the proceedings of a Machine
Translation conference held in the Estonian capital, Tallinn, in 1962, but
the editors of the conference proceedings added that no more was heard
of Vakher's machine, so presumably the prototype was never constructed.
The first genuine forerunners of Machine Translation were two de-
vices patented almost simultaneously in 1933, one in France by Georges
Artsrouni and the other in Russia by Petr Trojanskii. In both cases
the patents were for electro-mechanical devices capable of being used
as translation dictionaries.
Artsrouni's Machine
Georges Artsrouni was a French engineer of Armenian extraction who
had been a student in St. Petersburg. His patent was for what he called a
mechanical brain, a general-purpose machine which could also function,
with some equipment added, as a mechanical multilingual dictionary. He
suggested various applications for his mechanical brain, such as the auto-
matic production of railway timetables, telephone directories, commer-
