“Lights flash, there is a subdued clinking and clanking, and in 10 seconds you’ve got the translation,” it said.Ĭurious to see if it had got it right, I copied the Russian text from the story and opened a new tab in my browser. The reporter, in suitably sensational language, explained “the brain” was fed a sentence in Russian to translate into English. The short Associated Press article about an IBM computer, trumpeted as the first computer capable of translation between different languages, ended with an example of its skills. It happened to me most recently when, browsing an online newspaper archive, I came across a 1954 article in the Los Angeles Times about the dawning age of language translation by computers. There are times when I feel as if I’m truly living in the future.
