Back in the days of yore, language translation was a highly specialized profession, critical for coordinating diplomacy or international trade. The first bilingual dictionary book, Vocabularius ex quo, was a German-Latin set of words published in 1467, while clay tablets containing lists of works in Sumerian and Akkadian date back as early as 2300 B.C.
Language translation has become easier over the years in many cases thanks to the work of linguists and other anthropologists. The development of computers and eventually, artificial intelligence, has given a massive push to language translation, taking it out of the hands of specialists or weighty books and into our phones.
But how has translation applications like Google Translate developed over time, and what were their predecessors?
People have tried to use computers to translate languages since the mid-20th century.
“The idea of online translation was something that people strived for when computers began,” says ...
