Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
and “to dismiss” show a remarkable phonological agreement (i.e., they
had similar sounds) and a remarkable graphical similarity (i.e., the Chi-
nese pictograms for the words appeared similar). Weaver's comment was:
“This all seems very strange until one thinks of the two meanings of 'to
fire' in English. Is this only happenstance? How widespread are such
correlations?” Clearly Weaver thought that such universals might be very
common.
At the end of his 1949 memorandum, Weaver asserted his belief in
the existence and applicability of language universals with what is one of
the best-known metaphors in the literature of Machine Translation:
Think, by analogy, of individuals living in a series of tall closed
towers, all erected over a common foundation. When they try to
communicate with one another, they shout back and forth, each
from his own closed tower. It is difficult to make the sound pen-
etrate even the nearest towers, and communication proceeds very
poorly indeed. But, when an individual goes down his tower, he
finds himself in a great open basement, common to all the tow-
ers. Here he establishes easy and useful communication with the
persons who have also descended from their towers.
Thus it may be true that the way to translate from Chinese to
Arabic, or from Russian to Portuguese, is not to attempt the di-
rect route, shouting from tower to tower. Perhaps the way is to
descend, from each language, down to the common base of hu-
man communication—the real but as yet undiscovered universal
language—and then re-emerge by whatever particular route is
convenient. [6]
The response to Weaver's memorandum was mixed. Some rejected the
very idea of mechanizing the complexity of translation, in much the same
terms as many professional translators reject Machine Translation today.
Others, however, were considerably less negative, and ultimately his sem-
inal 12-page memo had the effect of launching the field of Machine
Translation as a subject for serious scientific research. Perhaps the most
significant outcome of the memorandum was the decision in 1951, at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology to appoint the logician Yehoshua
Bar-Hillel to the first-ever research position in Machine Translation. Bar-
Hillel wrote the first report on the state of the art and convened the first
conference on Machine Translation in June 1952, a conference that was
to have a highly catalytic effect on the field.
