The automated translation of texts became a research subject for the first time at MIT in 1951, followed by a Georgetown University Machine Translation team the same year. René Descartes, French philosopher and mathematician, discussed why a universal language would be impossible to create, based mostly on his experience with mathematical analysis and interpretations. By using simple word counts, he raised doubts on the authorship of many of Shakespeare’s written works, igniting a debate that would last until the very XXI century. Mendenhall attempted to characterize and compare the style of different authors through the frequency distribution of three-letter words, four-letter-words, five-letter-words and so on, trying to detect patterns in each author’s writing style. Thomas Corwin Mendenhall, a 19th century physicist, worked on the quantitative analysis of writing style, something that would later be known as stylometry. In fact, mathematicians had already tackled a few “word” problems in the past. Using statistics to tackle problems involving words and texts wasn’t something new at all by 2007. The most powerful and successful translator was based on statistics. The revolution started in 2007, when Google announced a new, proprietary algorithm, based on statistical models, which would improve the accuracy of its translation efforts by far. At first, the system was based on SYSTRAN, a software engine which is still used by several other online translation services such as Yahoo! Babel Fish, AOL, and Yahoo.
Google Translate is a well-known app from Google, which works as a multi-language functional translator. Suddenly, to a place where numbers didn’t really have much of a space, some thought of introducing statistical analysis and changed it forever. It is therefore curious that one of the most outstanding and recognizable breakthroughs that statistical techniques brought to science happened within the linguistics discipline, a “word” field.
Statisticians work with numbers that is what we are good at. Statistics are usually regarded as a numbers science.
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