Machine translation: Past, present and future

The attempt to translate meaning from one language to another by formal means traces back to the philosophical schools of secret and universal languages as they were originated by Ramon Llull (13th c.) or Johann Joachim Becher (17th c.). Today, machine translation (mt) is known as the crowning discipline of natural language processing. Due to current mt approaches, the time needed to develop new systems with similar power to older ones has decreased enormously. In this article, the history of mt, the difference with computer aided translation, current approaches and future perspectives are discussed