Slopfest #28 · 1954 · Vienna
Solved in Three to Five Years
Machine translation was declared nearly finished in 1954. So was the festival website.
Museum status: On view by appointment. Appointments not available.
- Venue
- Palais Ferstel, the arcade
- Attendance
- 302
- Fun fact
- 250-word vocabulary, 6 grammar rules, 0 Viennese
What happened
The festival offered simultaneous translation from Viennese into German, by a machine the committee promised would be ready in three to five years. In the meantime, three waiters did it by hand. The machine was finally ready in 2023, and it still translates 'Oida' as 'old one'.
“It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.”
Elsewhere in 1954
The Georgetown–IBM experiment machine-translates 60 Russian sentences into English. Its organizers predict success within a few years.
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