Noam Chomsky and the Manufacturing of American Dissent: 2 videos

[Paul Rigby]

1) Sydney M. Lamb (Edited by Jonathan Webster). Language and Reality (London & NY: Continuum, 2004; 524pp):

p.51: “we were informed by the man in charge of machine translation for the CIA (who was influencing the allocation of NSF* funds for MT research)…”

From context, we’re talking the period 1956-58.

*National Science Foundation

2) US “Government” funding for machine translation at MIT, 1954-1964

Language and Machines: Computers in Translation and Linguistics (1966), p.108:

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=9547&page=108

Second only to Harvard?

3) Lost in translation

Efforts to design software that can translate languages fluently have encountered a problem: how do you program common sense?

by Stephen Budiansky

When the field was still in its infancy, in the early 1960s, an apocryphal tale went around about a computer that the CIA had built to translate between English and Russian: to test the machine, the programmers decided to have it translate a phrase into Russian and then translate the result back into English, to see if they'd get the same words they started with. The director of the CIA was invited to do the honors; the programmers all gathered expectantly around the console to watch as the director typed in the test words: "Out of sight, out of mind." The computer silently ground through its calculations. Hours passed. Then, suddenly, magnetic tapes whirred, lights blinked, and a printer clattered out the result: "Invisible insanity."

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98dec/computer.htm