Contents -- Historical Introduction; The Nature of Calculating and Data Processing Machines; The Analysis of Content and Structure; Stylistic Analysis;

General Aspects of Language Translation; Programming Technique for Mechanical Translation; The Mechanical Transcription of Braille;
French; German; Russian; Multi-lingual Translation;
Technical Details of a Proposed Translating Machine
Subject index; Name index

'First proposals for machine translation (MT) arose during discussion in 1947 between the senior author (Booth) and Warren Weaver, Director for the Natural Sciences Division, Rockefeller Foundation. These led to a small amount of practical investigation in England between 1948 and 1950; in particular to some detailed proposals for carrying out MT on standard punched-card machines. But it was not until 1955... that extensive effort could be devoted to the preparation of actual programmes for translating one language into another...

'The present book contains an account of some of the results which have been obtained by Dr Booth and his colleagues at Birkbeck College Computational Laboratory on the application of digital calculators to linguistic problems. It is a record of the actual details of the translating techniques achieved with the APEXC computer.

No reference has been made to detailed programming, as a full account may be gained from the companion volume to this book, Programming for an Automatic Digital Calculator, by K H V Booth...' (from the jacket flap)