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“MT” is machine translation, and Charles Babbage was the person who with Ada Lovelace^§MS1.3.2a prefigured in the nineteenth century the principles and mechanics of computing.

After the October Revolution, Troyanskii entered the Institute of Red Professors, taught at a number of institutions of higher education, and contributed to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. From the early 1930s until his death in 1950, his life was devoted to the development of the theory and practice of machine translation. For his first efforts, he was awarded in 1933 an “author’s certificate,” number 40995. This was the equivalent of a patent in the USSR, where intellectual property could not become private property.¹¹¹

Digital computing was unimaginable at the time, but photographic film was readily available. So Troyanskii developed a mechanism not unlike the phototypesetting systems that were to come into widespread use in the 1970s. In his own words from the 1933 application, “The proposed machine is designed for selecting and typing words when translating from one language to another or several others simultaneously and essentially consists of a belt moving on a desk with words in different languages upon it and provided with perforations for positioning the belt in front of a photographic camera, adjacent to which is located a typewriter with additional keys for typing conventional signs alongside the photographed word.”¹¹²

Over the years, Troyanskii developed his idea, and by 1947, this was no mere word-for-word process. Between any pair of languages to be translated was an intermediate language of “logical symbols,” which Troyanskii initially borrowed from Esperanto. At the Sixteenth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union held in Moscow in 1930, Joseph Stalin had said that “in the period of the victory of socialism on a world scale, when socialism is consolidated and becomes part of every-day life, national languages will inevitably merge into one common language which, of course, will be neither Great Russian nor German, but something new.”¹¹³ This was in line with a version of the Marxist theory of base and superstructure, where the social, political, and cultural infrastructures reflected and served the interests of the ruling class who controlled the economic base. According to this theory, language was in the superstructure. When the base changed, culture and language would inevitably change too, by virtue of their economic determination.

Later, Stalin came to consider this kind of internationalism, the very notion that one day there might be a world language, a sign of collaboration with the “internationalist” enemies of the Soviet Union, and its proponents were imprisoned or executed.^§AS2.2.1e The possibility of worldwide revolution Stalin replaced with the idea “socialism in one country.”

In a series of articles and exchanges with linguists in Pravda in the last years of his life and later published as a book, Stalin now said that language transcended epochs and class interests, and so its basis would not change with the arrival of socialism.^§AS2.2.1e “Grammar is the outcome of a process of abstraction performed by the human mind over a long period of time; it is an indication of the tremendous achievement of thought. In this respect grammar resembles geometry, which in giving its laws abstracts itself from concrete objects, regarding objects as bodies devoid of concreteness, and defining the relations between them not as the concrete relations of concrete objects but as the relations of bodies in general.”¹¹⁴ These were odd things for a dictator to care about.

So, with Stalin’s change of heart about language, Troyanskii dropped the Esperanto, but kept the intermediate logical symbolism. “[U]niversality of logical make-up brings languages together despite the diversity of their structures, grammars, and lexicons, and that makes the differences surmountable … It is on the basis of this universality that I created the so-called form of logical parsing common for all languages, as a text form intermediate in the translation process.”¹¹⁵

Despite numerous publications and discussions with the USSR Academy of Sciences, Troyanskii did not manage to garner support to translate his theories into mechanized practice. However, the significance of his thinking came to be realized after his death. In 1957 the Academy of Sciences set up a committee of its Presidium to investigate Troyanskii’s work, and to publish his unpublished manuscripts.¹¹⁶ Stalin had died, and the Khrushchev era was a time of comparative openness in the USSR and scientific triumphalism too. It was time to return to Troyanskii’s ideas.

By the time Bar-Hillel undertook his international survey in 1959, he found ten research groups working on machine translation in the USSR. At the first All-Union Conference on Machine Translation in Moscow in 1958, seventy-nine institutions were represented, with seventy-one presentations on the program. “If anything,” he concluded, “Russian scientists may be somewhat ahead in the linguistic analysis, whereas they are probably somewhat behind in actual machine-testing.”¹¹⁷

A number of these research groups were working with versions of Troyanskii’s idea of a formal, intermediating language, or interlingua. One of the most advanced of the groups was the Leningrad State University Experimental Laboratory of Machine Translation, led by N.D. Andreyev.¹¹⁸ Igor Mel’chuk and others were working on a different version of this idea at the Institute of Linguistics in Moscow.¹¹⁹ So was D.Yu. Panov at the Institute of Scientific Information of the USSR Academy of Sciences.¹²⁰

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¹¹⁰ Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, 1960, “The Present Status of Automatic Translation of Languages,” Advances in Computers 1:91–163, p. 126.

¹¹¹ W. John Hutchins, 2000b, “Petr Petrovich Troyanskii (1894–1950): A Forgotten Pioneer of Mechanical Translation,” Machine Translation 15(3):187–221.

¹¹² Ibid.

¹¹³ J.V. Stalin, 1950 [1972], Marxism and Problems of Linguistics, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.

¹¹⁴ Ibid.

¹¹⁵ W. John Hutchins, 2000b, “Petr Petrovich Troyanskii (1894–1950): A Forgotten Pioneer of Mechanical Translation,” Machine Translation 15(3):187–221, pp. 191–92.

¹¹⁶ Ibid.

¹¹⁷ Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, 1960, “The Present Status of Automatic Translation of Languages,” Advances in Computers 1:91–163, pp. 125–28.

¹¹⁸ N.D. Andreev, 1967, “The Intermediary Language and the Focal Point of Machine Translation,” pp. 1–27 in Machine Translation, edited by A.D. Booth, Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing; W. John Hutchins, 1995, “Machine Translation: A Brief History,” pp. 431–45 in Concise History of the Language Sciences: From the Sumerians to the Cognitivists, edited by E.F.K. Koerner and R.E. Asher, Oxford: Pergamon Press; Raimund J. Piotrovskij, 2000, “MT in the Former USSR and the Newly Independent States (NIS): Prehistory, Romantic Era, Prosaic Time,” pp. 232–51 in Early Years in Machine Translation: Memoirs and Biographies of Pioneers, edited by W.J. Hutchins, Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Jurij N. Marčuk, 2000, “Machine Translation: Early Years in the USSR,” pp. 243–52 in ibid.

¹¹⁹ F. Papp, 1966, Mathematical Linguistics in the Soviet Union, The Hague: Mouton, pp. 121–22.

¹²⁰ D. Yu. Panov, 1960, Automatic Translation, London: Pergamon Press, pp. 54–64.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 221–224. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Petr Petrovich Troyanskii’s “Intermediate Logical Symbols” §AS2.2.1b