On machine translation September 28th, 2008

A typical story occurred in early machine translation efforts, which were generously funded by the U.S. National Research Council in an attempt to speed up the translation of Russian scientific papers in the wake of the Sputnik launch in 1957. […] The famous re-translation of “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” as “the vodka is good but the meat is rotten” illustrates the difficulties encountered.