W dniu 02.01.2025 o 18:04, Phil Smith III pisze:
This thread has not disappointed. Lots of good history.
Re Autocoder: My dad was hired by OGA (Other Government Agency, aka CIA) in the
50s, as he was working on his PhD in Slavic linguistics, to work on their
machine translation project. He would describe to a programmer what he wanted a
program to do; the programmer would write it out on Autocoder sheets; a
keypunch operator would input it; and a day or two later, he'd find out what it
did. He figured out that if he learned to program, he could shorten that cycle
time, so he did. Which led to another machine translation project at IBM
Yorktown. Neither was successful.
He subsequently wound up in academia but continued to freelance for the
government doing translations, typically of obscure Slavic languages for which
they didn't have any resident experts. This led to a fun incident in high
school where my sister's class was asked to see if they had a dictionary in the
house; she reported that she'd found 42. And was accused of lying. Which got
the teacher a visit from my dad, who was cheerful but direct about it, and who
noted that this list included the Polish-Russian Technical Dictionary, which
included not a word of English...
I wish he'd lived long enough to see Google Translate, which, while not
perfect, is pretty impressive--and which, when backed by someone fluent, is
surely able to improve translation times of critical documents by an order of
magnitude or two.
Well, I'm not linguist, however I could have similar number of
dictionaries in home. Including several Polish-Russian Technical :-)
To be honest majority is/was Polish-English or Polish-Russian (and vice
versa). Plus few German, Czech, Hungarian and Greek. And - just counted
- I have 6 Polish-English IT dictionaries.
I wrote is/was, because I disposed some of them.
--
Radoslaw Skorupka
Lodz, Poland
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