Electronic Translator

Seated at an International Business Machines Corp. electronic computer last week, a girl who understands not a word of Russian punched out the message: Mi pyeryedayem mislyi posryedstvom ryech-yi. In a few seconds the mechanical "brain" spewed out a translation from Russian to English: "We transmit thoughts by means of speech."

It was a big step for a computer to venture from the relatively precise fields of mathematics and physics into the more nebulous realm of language translation. But the IBM scientists and Georgetown University linguists who had helped set up the experiment thought it was an auspicious start. With a vocabulary of only 250 words, the machine was able to translate sentences dealing with politics, law, mathematics, chemistry, metallurgy, communications and military affairs. Samples: "Magnitude of angle is determined by the relation of length of arc to radius." "Starch is produced by mechanical methods from potatoes," "A military court sentenced a sergeant to deprival of civil rights." To translate clearly, the machine had to have some simple translation rules (i.e., how to choose one of several meanings) impressed on its "memory" apparatus. And Russian letters had to be converted to their English alphabet equivalents.

The computer is far from ready to translate a book from Russian to English. But, says Georgetown Scholar Leon Dostert: "Five, perhaps three, years hence, interlingual meaning conversion by electronic process . . . may well be an accomplished fact."

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