Pyotr Trojanskii

For many centuries, people have been trying to break down the language barrier, to create a common language for all people, to find a way to learn all languages, or to create a technology that allows people to understand foreign languages without wasting time and effort in learning them. The first ideas date back to the 17^th century, when René Descartes (in a letter dated 1629 to Marin Mersenne), Athanasius Kircher (1663, Polygraphia nova treatise), and Gottfried Leibniz (1666, Dissertatio de arte combinatoria treatise) independently proposed a universal language as a new basis for logical thinking and for eliminating the mutual misunderstanding that occurs due to illogical languages.

In 1661 George Dalgarno (1616–1687), a Scottish schoolteacher in Oxford, published the book Ars signorum, vulgo character universalis et lingua philosophica, in which he presented his approach to creating a universal language for scientists and philosophers, which would replace Latin. In 1668, Dalgarno’s friend John Wilkins (1614–1672), an Anglican clergyman, natural philosopher, and author, one of the founders of the Royal Society, published a treatise, “Experience on the true symbolism and philosophical language”, in which he presented a similar idea. However, their proposal did not meet with approval among linguists. Much later, in the late 19^th century, scientists returned to developing a single international language, which led to the creation of Esperanto. However, the first attempts at machine translation were still decades away.

In the late 1920s, scientists started talking about developing machine translation technology. In 1929, the Italian Federico Pucci wrote his study on “automatic translator”. In 1932, Georges Artsrouni, a French engineer, created a machine that could be used as a bilingual automatic dictionary. At the same time, in 1933, the Soviet engineer Pyotr Trojanskii invented “a machine for the automatic production of ready typed translations requiring only literally editing from one language simultaneously into several other languages”. The patent application for the machine was filed on 5 September 1933 (авторское свидетельство СССР № 40995, this was the equivalent of a patent in the USSR, where intellectual property could not become private property, was granted in January 1935).

Trojanskii’s necessarily simple invention was a table with a slanted surface and an old-school film camera combined with a typewriter. The typewriter keys encode morphological and grammatical information, and its ribbon is fed simultaneously with the photographic film. A movable plate of printed words, called the glossary field, was attached to the surface of the device. The words in the glossary field were accompanied by translations into four different languages and arranged like letters on a keyboard: the most frequently used ones were closer to the centre of the field.

Let’s see an excerpt and a drawing (see the upper drawing) from the patent application:
A machine for selecting and typing words when translating from one language into another or several others simultaneously, characterized by a belt (2) provided with columns, with words in different languages pasted on it and furnished with perforations (3) for positioning the required word or words against an aperture in the desk, above which a photographic camera is positioned for recording on a light-sensitive film the basic word with its corgresponding row of words in foreign languages, and, nearby, a typewriter furnished with additional keys for typing on a paper tape conventional signd alongside the photographed word.

Trojanskii saw three stages in mechanical translation:
1. A person-editor who knows the source language converted the words of the sentences into the “basic” form and arranged the syntactic functions of the words to free the input text from the obscurities of the morphological, syntactic, and semantic character.
2. A machine translates these forms and functions into the given language,
3. The received text is edited by a human, bringing the translated text to a correct and pleasant sound.
The inventor proceeded from the fact that in many languages, ​​the order of words in sentences is the same, and therefore, if you translate word for word, the meaning of the sentence can be understood. For every word, its forms were printed, and then the editor had to combine a set of words into a connected text. If there were homographs (words identical in spelling, but different in meaning), then there were such instructions for them:
• Translation (on duty)
• Translation (Essays)
• Translation (arrows)
• Translation (pictures).
The Trojanskii machine’s dictionary field contained 80000 root words (180000 root words in Russian, 200000 in English).
Later, in the 1940s, Trojanskii considered the prospects of creating a powerful translation device based on modern communications technologies. Sadly, the ideas of Trojanskii were deemed useless in the USSR (in 1933, he requested from the USSR Academy of Sciences to discuss this issue with the Academy’s linguists. The scientists were skeptical about the idea: discussions around the project continued for eleven years, after which contact with Troyansky was suddenly lost, and he presumably left Moscow.) and remained unknown even to scholars for a long time, to be rediscovered only in the late 1950s. A detailed description of the works of Trojanskii can be found in a Russian book from 1959 (see Переводная машина Троянского).

Biography of Pyotr Trojanskii

Пётр Петрович Смирнов-Троянский (Pyotr Petrovich Smirnov-Trojanskii) was born in January 1894 into the family of the railway repair shop worker Пётр Троянский in Orenburg, a town in the Southern Urals, a trading station and, since the completion of the Trans-Aral Railway, a prominent railway junction en route to the new Central Asian possessions and to Siberia. The Trojanskii family had fourteen children, and life was hard. Pyotr finished a parish school in Orenburg and passed gymnasia examinations without attending classes, then, he entered the University of St. Petersburg. There, he made his living by giving lessons. A participation in World War I prevented him from finishing university (in 1917, he was mentioned as Прапорщик 105 запаснаго полка Георгиевского войскового собора г. Оренбурга).

After the Great October Revolution of 1917, Pyotr obviously was a supporter of the communist party and entered the Institute of Red Professors. Afterwards, he became an Esperantist (he built a system of coding grammatical information based on the grammar of Esperanto, but it was considered unreliable for political reasons) and taught social sciences and the history of science and technology at several universities. In 1927—1934, he participated in compiling the Technical Encyclopedia (articles for economy), and in 1926—1947, he took part in compiling the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. From the beginning of the 1930s, Trojanskii devoted more and more time to putting into practice his idea of a translating machine. His poor health (he suffered from stenocardia) and a long break because of WWII prevented him from completing the work on mechanising translation, which he considered the cause of his whole life.

Pyotr Petrovich Trojanskii was married twice. In 1917, he married Татьяна Николаева Бехтерова (born 1897), the daughter of a veterinary surgeon. Later, he married Зоя Николаевна Смирнова-Троянская (born 1904), a medical doctor. By the late 1930s, he was calling himself Smirnov-Trojanskii, apparently adopting his wife’s surname. It is under this name that he is often referred to in the literature, particularly outside Russia.

Pyotr Petrovich Trojanskii died on 24 May 1950.

Source:
И. К. Бельская, Д. Ю. Панов, “Перeводная машина П. П. Смирнова-Троянского: сборник материалов о машине для перевода с одного языка на другие, предложенной П.П. Смирновым-Троянским в 1933 г.”, Москва, 1959.