A Lost Croatian Cybernetic Machine Translation Program
This is an incremental historical analysis for researchers in AI and machine translation history, focusing on a lesser-known regional program.
This paper explores the historical significance of Bulcsu Laszlo's pioneering machine translation research in 1950s-1960s Yugoslavia, highlighting his cybernetic methods that differed from contemporary logical approaches and were later adopted by mainstream AI.
We are exploring the historical significance of research in the field of machine translation conducted by Bulcsu Laszlo, Croatian linguist, who was a pioneer in machine translation in Yugoslavia during the 1950s. We are focused on two important seminal papers written by members of his research group from 1959 and 1962, as well as their legacy in establishing a Croatian machine translation program based around the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb in the late 1950s and early 1960s. We are exploring their work in connection with the beginnings of machine translation in the USA and USSR, motivated by the Cold War and the intelligence needs of the period. We also present the approach to machine translation advocated by the Croatian group in Yugoslavia, which is different from the usual logical approaches of the period, and his advocacy of cybernetic methods, which would be adopted as a canon by the mainstream AI community only decades later.