Add to ORKGThe development of MT system design is described in four periods: the early experimental period (1946-54), the period of large-scale research on 'direct translation' systems (1956-66), the period after the ALPAC report in which the 'interlingual ' and 'transfer ' approaches were developed (1966-75), and the current period in which interactive systems and 'artificial intelligence ' approaches have appeared together with proposals for the multilingual system EUROTRA (since 1975). The evolution of machine translation has been influenced by many factors during a quarter century of research and development. In the early years the limitations of computer hardware and the inadequacies of programming languag...