On Machine Translation: Selected Papers
The postwar decades are well known for having brought dramatic change to American linguistics on many fronts. This paper explores an internally focused aspect of this change: conditions of explanation. The two questions at stake are, firstly, what counts as explanation in linguistics? and, secondly, how is this decided? I argue that transformational grammarians dominated the setting of explanatory criteria in 1960s American syntax, and that this dominance was essential to the overall success of that theory. Importantly, rival grammarians were forced to devote as much time and effort to fitting their theories to the transformational criteria as they were to advancing their own explanatory priorities. By successfully naming the conditions for explanation, transformationalists provided their own supporters with significant questions to pursue and, simultaneously, drew energy away from rivals. This monopoly over explanatory criteria was central to the dominant position transformational grammar established in the American academic linguistics community.
In den 60er und 70er Jahren sind insbesondere an Universitäten mit Dolmetscherinstituten wie z.B. Heidelberg, Lehrstühle für Übersetzungswissenschaft eingerichtet worden, deren Inhaber/innen meist auf dem Gebiet der Angewandten Sprachwissenschaft qualifiziert waren, und die die Aufgabe hatten, den angehenden Übersetzer/innen und Dolmetscher/innen einen theoretischen und methodischen Hintergrund zu vermitteln und ihnen die reflektive Überprüfung der Lehrinhalte zu ermöglichen. Über diesen im Lehrplan begründeten Zweck hinaus entwickelte sich die Übersetzungswissenschaft ab den 70er Jahren zu einer eigenen akademischen Disziplin, deren interdisziplinäre Ausrichtung zunehmend deutlicher hervortrat.
Zimmermann resümiert die Entwicklung der maschinellen Übersetzung in Theorie und Praxis und stellt fest, dass zumindest eine der Beschränkungen, die der ALPAC-Report im Jahre 1966 als Gründe für die Unmöglichkeit einer FAHQT (fully automatic high-quality translation) genannt hat, nicht mehr gilt, nämlich die Unzulänglichkeit der Datentechnik: "Die Realisierung eines MT-Systems im Heimcomputer ist in den Bereich des ökonomisch und technisch Möglichen gerückt." Das Hauptaugenmerk wird aber in den kommenden Jahren eher auf einer computer"gestützten" Übersetzung liegen.
The past decade has seen an explosion of work on the history of the human sciences during the Cold War. This work, however, does not engage with one of the leading human sciences of the period: linguistics. This article begins to rectify this knowledge gap by investigating the influence of linguistics and its concept of study, language, on American public, political and intellectual life during the postwar and early Cold War years. I show that language emerged in three frameworks in this period: language as tool, language as weapon, and language as knowledge. As America stepped onto the international stage, language and linguistics were at the forefront: the military poured millions of dollars into machine translation, American diplomats were required to master scores of foreign languages, and schoolchildren were exposed to language-learning on a scale never before seen in the United States. Together, I argue, language and linguistics formed a critical part of the rise of American leadership in the new world order - one that provided communities as dispersed as the military, the diplomatic corps, scientists and language teachers with a powerful way of tackling the problems they faced. To date, linguistics has not been integrated into the broader framework of Cold War human sciences. In this article, I aim to bring both language, as concept, and linguistics, as discipline, into this framework. In doing so, I pave the way for future work on the history of linguistics as a human science.
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