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Article ID: CBB682716578

The Dostoevsky Machine in Georgetown: Scientific Translation in the Cold War (2016)

Gordin, Michael (Author)

Annals of Science: The History of Science and Technology
Volume: 73
Issue: 2
Pages: 208-223

DOI: 10.1080/00033790.2014.917437

URI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00033790.2014.917437

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Communication of scientific ideas Transmission of texts Digitization Technology and culture Computers and computing Cold War Linguistics; philology Translations Communication technology Science and politics 20th century

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.

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