This course aims to enable students to grasp the history of machine translation from a computational linguistic point of view as well as from the translation perspective. The different approaches adopted for machine translation show how research efforts have been spent to solve translation problems using the computer. The historical development will lay a solid foundation for students to understand how the technology has evolved due to the deepening understanding of computational linguistics and translation studies, and the advent of new tools, both material and conceptual ones. Upon completing the course, students should be able to approach machine translation with a more comprehensive outlook.

Term paper: 40%
Presentation: 40%
Classroom participation: 20%