The years of mechanization (1940-1980): a history of Machine Translation
Abstract
We sketched the history of machine translation (MT) from the 1940s to the 1980s from a linguistic historiography perspective and the concept of research programs. For this purpose, two questions were established according to the selected historical period: (1) What are the characteristics and the use of technological tools? (2) What are the impacts such changes have on social contexts of use in relation to the performance of human translators? The methodological direction adopted to demonstrate the results in this article was established into three phases: 1st. heuristic phase: periodization definition; selection/treatment of corpus; 2nd. hermeneutic phase: guidelines establishment for the analysis; 3rd. expository phase: results presentation through a historiographical narrative. The analysis material was organized and hierarchized into two large sets: documents regarding functionalities and tools and documents in connection with the history of MT. This article argues that for about 40 years, the MT was characterized by initiatives and operations of a mechanization program that began to change the translator's profile and professional insertion.
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