Seasoned future-watchers may think that they have been here before. On January 7, 1954, IBM issued a press release announcing that it had managed to translate Russian into English using an electronic brain. Although Professor Léon Dostert, the Georgetown language scholar involved in the project, conceded it wasn’t yet possible “to insert a Russian book at one end and come out with an English book at the other”, he predicted that within three to five years “interlingual meaning conversion by electronic process ... may well be an accomplished fact”.source:timesonline