This paper takes three distinct passes through the history of Machine Translation (MT) in the Soviet Union, which is typically understood as concentrating in a single boom period that lasted from roughly 1955 to 1965. In both the Soviet Union and the United States—in explicit competition with each other—there was a tremendous wave of investment in adapting computers to nonnumerical tasks that has only recently drawn the attention of historians, primarily focusing on the American example. The Soviet Union, however, quickly came to assume prominence in the field both in terms of scale and diversity of approaches. At the same moment, Soviet linguists excavated a forgotten precursor, P. P. Smirnov-Troianskii, who had designed a translating machine in the early 1930s. Juxtaposing the multiple contexts in which Smirnov-Troianskii’s machine was reconceptualized and reappropriated for various ends, the article demonstrates the fundamental embodying of the algorithm in the early days of MT and also how the proliferation of narratives about Soviet MT exposes fault lines in contemporary historiography.

中文翻译：

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苏联机器翻译的遗忘与再发现

本文对苏联机器翻译 (MT) 的历史进行了三个不同的回顾，通常将其理解为集中在大约从 1955 年到 1965 年的单一繁荣时期。相互之间的明显竞争——在使计算机适应非数值任务方面出现了巨大的投资浪潮，直到最近才引起历史学家的注意，主要集中在美国的例子上。然而，苏联很快就在该领域的规模和方法多样性方面占据了突出地位。与此同时，苏联语言学家发掘了一个被遗忘的先驱，PP Smirnov-Troianskii，他在 1930 年代初期设计了一台翻译机。