The use of mechanical dictionaries to overcome the barriers of language was first suggested in the 17th century. However, it was not until the 20th century that the first concrete proposals were made, in patents issued independently in 1933 by George Artsrouni, a French-Armenian, and by a Russian, Petr Smirnov- Troyanskii. Artsrouni designed a storage device on paper tape which could be used to find the equivalent of any word in another language; a prototype was apparently demonstrated in 1937. The proposals by Troyanskii were in retrospect more significant. He envisioned three stages of mechanical translation: first, an editor knowing only the source language was to undertake the 'logical' analysis of words into their base forms and syntactic functions; secondly, the machine was to transform sequences of base forms and functions into equivalent sequences in the target language; finally, another editor knowing only the target language was to convert this output into the normal forms of his own language. Troyanskii envisioned both bilingual and multilingual translation. Although his patent referred only to the machine which would undertake the second stage, Troyanskii believed that "the process of logical analysis could itself be mechanized".
哪位高人帮忙翻译一下,谢绝机翻,先此谢过!