用AI验证94年前的机械翻译系统，发现其效果惊人稳定。
The Forgotten Code: Validating a Century-Old Translation System with AI
- 用AI按1931年规则重译两段经典文本，复现当年方法。
- 1931与2025年两次翻译结果差异极小，平均误差低。
- 让尘封百年的翻译系统复活，适合对翻译史感兴趣者。
1929年，费德里科·普奇提出一种基于规则的机械翻译系统（现代规则机器翻译的前身），并于1931年在意大利萨莱诺出版完整方法。本研究通过人工智能重现该系统：让AI依据普奇方法重译两段原文——但丁《新生》片段（意译法）和伏尔泰《扎第格》片段（法译意）。结果表明，1931年与2025年两次翻译仅存在微小差异，平均偏差极低。在此基础上，AI成功将原文译为英语、西班牙语和德语，结果一致。该系统被重新激活，近百年来首次走出作者个人实验，可用于现代技术文本翻译。此验证不仅确认了普奇的历史地位，也使其成为机器翻译早期发展的重要贡献者，应与特罗扬斯基、博斯、韦弗等人物并列审视，或改写学界对机器翻译史的理解。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
A pioneering rule-based mechanical translation system (precursor of modern RBMTs) was first presented in December 1929 by its inventor, Federico Pucci, who later published the full method in a book titled "Il traduttore meccanico ed il metodo per corrispondersi fra Europei conoscendo ciascuno solo la propria lingua: Parte I", in Salerno (Italy), in 1931. This study illustrates how AI breathes new life into the system of international keys and ideograms devised by Pucci to translate from/into any Romance language (at least as a first step). The methodology involves having the AIs retranslate, following Pucci's method, the two text excerpts originally translated in 1931 and clearly documented in his publication: a passage from Dante's La Vita Nuova, translated from Italian into French, and a passage from Voltaire's Zadig, translated from French into Italian. The result is notable: the two texts, translated 94 years apart using the same method--by Pucci in 1931 and by AIs in 2025--show a low average difference, with only minor variations observed. With Pucci's system thus validated, it became feasible to have the AIs reproduce the excerpts in English, Spanish, and German according to his method. The results were consistent, and Pucci--via Artificial Intelligence--was tasked with translating more modern and technical texts, thereby reviving, nearly a century later, an invention that had remained almost entirely unknown and never applied beyond its creator, now brought to wider attention and opened to possible experimentation. Such a demonstration would not only affirm Pucci's historical status but also place him among the precursors and intellectual contributors to machine translation, whose work merits examination alongside figures such as Troyanskij, Booth, and Weaver, with possible consequences for how the history of the field is understood.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品；中文卡片由大模型生成，请以原文为准。