Zellig S. Harris’ Transfer Grammar and Its Application with NooJ

In 1954, with his article entitled Transfer Grammar (published in “The International Journal of American Linguistics”, Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 259–270, University of Chicago Press), Zellig S. Harris was the first linguist to approach the nascent Automatic Translation (AT) from the point of view of structuralist and formal linguistics. This article, written in the pivotal period for the first AT attempts in the US, outlines a translation method that wants to: Formally measure the difference between languages, in terms of grammatical structures; Define the point of minimum difference (or maximum similarity) between any type of language pair; Define the difference between the languages as the number and content of grammatical instructions needed to generate the utterances of one language from the utterances of the other. At the time, the purposes of Harris’s article were therefore extremely innovative, since they considered translation as a process in which meaning transfers could only be achieved based on morphosyntactic analyses and evaluations. Moreover, it is worth stressing that at the time the first AT experiments performed word-for-word translations, without taking into account (not even statistically) the contexts in which the words co-occurred. As is known, this method proved to be unsuccessful, as regards the quality, time and costs of the translations made automatically. In 1966, this led ALPAC [1] to end AT research in the US, and cut off the flow of funding to it.