Advantages and Disadvantages in Machine Translation

There is some dispute about who first had the idea of translating automatically between human languages, but the actual development of MT can be traced to conversations and correspondence between Andrew D. Booth, a British crystallographer, and Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1947, and more specifically to a memorandum written by Weaver in 1949 to the Rockerfeller Foundation which included the following two sentences.
``I have a text in front of me which is written in Russian but I am going to pretend that it is really written in English and that it has been coded in some strange symbols. All I need to do is strip off the code in order to retrieve the information contained in the text.''
The analogy of translation and decoding may strike the sophisticated reader as simplistic (however complicated coding gets it is still basically a one-for-one substitution process where there is only one right answer --- translation is a far more complex and subtle business)…