METEO translates weather forecasts
On 9 December 1975 METEO, from the TAUM group at the University of Montreal, began translating Canada's public weather forecasts from English into French on an experimental basis, with full operation planned for 15 May 1976. Sentences the system accepted went to radio stations and newspapers without human revision.
Why it matters
For the first time, by its builders' account, the output of a machine translation system was to go straight to the public. The closed world of weather forecasts, with a small lexicon and telegraphic syntax, proved narrow enough for fully automatic translation to pay, which general text did not then allow.
John Chandioux, head of the METEO team, at the seminar of March 1976: sentences the system rejected were under 20 per cent of the input, for misspellings, characters blurred in transmission, words not in the dictionary and poor English; a human translator at the Translation Bureau handled those. Estimated load 30,000 words a day at over 1,000 words a minute, all-inclusive cost about a third of human translation. The program is a sequence of rewriting grammars in Q-Systems, run in FORTRAN on a CDC 7600; METEO derives from the TAUM 73 model. Chandioux's article in Meta was not read: érudit.org showed a bot check. The record does not claim 7,000-8,000 words a day, a share of edits or a date in 1981: the document read does not have them.