I thought I’d reboot my blog Dreamers and Doers – so it could use a captatio benevolentiae at this point. In this blog, I collect my thoughts on the history of translation technology – any technology that employs machinery for people to understand each other. At times, I take a peek at the science behind well-known technologies and services (like machine translation). I aspire to write my notes for the non-researcher: the professional translator, the student of engineering or linguistics – these posts are practically for anyone interested in language and technology. In this, I’m trying to contribute, meager as my contribution might be, to public communication about science and engineering, more specifically, language technology.

Two months ago, I started writing one post on how people tried to teach computers to tackle human language. That alone would deserve an entire book – no wonder my post stretched on, finally becoming a series of three.

These posts reflect my thoughts and my opinions – and they are also quite brief –, so I included many links where you can read more about the views of others. Often those links are just Wikipedia references, but you can go deeper from them, too: most Wikipedia articles point to a lot of further reading. You can also continue searching for the terms I use.

The three posts in the series I just mentioned are as follows – in the order I wrote them:

Universal Understanding, Universal Machine

Language in Numbers

Corpus Cosmology

All this has grown out from a university class – in Budapest, two or so years ago – where I talked about technology to students reading various languages. There I already spoke about dreamers and doers, a cycle of dreaming about a brighter future, and, following the dreams, creating tangible things from them. If you’re interested in where I come from, read the introductory post.

Enough said: let the posts speak for themselves. I remain as clumsy Quince in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and say: “If we offend, it is with our good will.”