Warren Weaver inspired the founders of Language Weaver to name themselves after him in the early 2000s, and the company was the first to commercialize and productize Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) and was also the source for much of the subsequent innovation in SMT. What really kick-started research was Cold War fear and the US analysts desire to easily read and translate Russian technical papers. But Weaver’s memo was not the only driver for this emerging field. In the famous memorandum referenced here, he said: “it is very tempting to say that a book written in Russian is simply a book written in English which was coded into the Russian code.” These proposals were based on information theory, successes in code-breaking during the Second World War, and theories about the universal principles underlying natural language. The first set of proposals for computer-based machine translation was presented in 1949 by Warren Weaver, a researcher at the Rockefeller Foundation in his now famous " Translation memorandum". One of the earliest mentions of automated translation involves Russian Peter Troyanskii who submitted a proposal that included both the bilingual dictionary and a method for dealing with grammatical roles between languages, based on the grammatical system of Esperanto, even before computers were available. When we consider the history of machine translation, the science by which computers automatically translate from one human language to another, we see that much of the science starts with Russian.
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