William John Hutchins (27 January 1939 – 9 January 2021) was an English

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

and information scientist who specialized in

machine translation Machine translation is use of computational techniques to translate text or speech from one language to another, including the contextual, idiomatic and pragmatic nuances of both languages. Early approaches were mostly rule-based or statisti ...

. He graduated as a Bachelor of Arts in French and German at the

University of Nottingham The University of Nottingham is a public research university in Nottingham, England. It was founded as University College Nottingham in 1881, and was granted a royal charter in 1948. Nottingham's main campus (University Park Campus, Nottingh ...

in 1960 and obtained a diploma in librarianship at University College London in 1962. He worked as assistant librarian at

Durham University Durham University (legally the University of Durham) is a collegiate university, collegiate public university, public research university in Durham, England, founded by an Act of Parliament (UK), Act of Parliament in 1832 and incorporated by r ...

(1962–1965) and at the

University of Sheffield The University of Sheffield (informally Sheffield University or TUOS) is a public university, public research university in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England. Its history traces back to the foundation of Sheffield Medical School in 1828, Fir ...

(1965–1971), and then as assistant librarian (1971–1980) and sub-librarian (1980–1998) at the

University of East Anglia The University of East Anglia (UEA) is a Public university, public research university in Norwich, England. Established in 1963 on a campus university, campus west of the city centre, the university has four faculties and twenty-six schools of ...

. In 2000 he obtained his PhD degree at the University of East Anglia. In addition to authoring numerous articles in journals and conferences about machine translation since 1963, he is particularly well known by the book ''An Introduction to Machine Translation'' (1992) which he co-authored with Harold Somers. John's service to the machine translation community, most of it after retirement, has been outstanding. After serving as editor of the UEA Papers in Linguistics, (1976–1982), he was editor of ''MT News International'', the bulletin of the International Association for Machine Translation (1992–1997), president of the European Association for Machine Translation (1995–2004) and of the International Association for Machine Translation (1999–2001), editor of the Compendium of Translation Software (1992–2012). John leveraged his experience as a librarian and machine translation scholar and became the librarian and the historian of machine translation. In the last decades, curator of one of the best resources about machine translation, the

Machine Translation Archive A machine is a physical system that uses power to apply forces and control movement to perform an action. The term is commonly applied to artificial devices, such as those employing engines or motors, but also to natural biological macromolecul ...

(archived, temporarily offline).

Awards and recognition

* 2001: IAMT Award of Honour. The

Association for Machine Translation Association may refer to: *Club (organization), an association of two or more people united by a common interest or goal *Trade association, an organization founded and funded by businesses that operate in a specific industry *Voluntary associatio ...

recognized John's dedication twice, first with the IAMT Award of Honour (2001) * 2013: IAMT Lifetime Achievement Award. The Association for Machine Translation recognized John's dedication for a second time.

Selected publications

* Hutchins, W. John (1975). ''Languages of indexing and classification. A linguistic study of structures and functions''. London: Peter Peregrinus. * Hutchins, W. John (1977). On the Problem of "Aboutness" in Document Analysis. ''Journal of Informatics'', 1, 17–35. * Hutchins, W. John (1978). The concept of "aboutness" in subject indexing. ''ASLIB Proceedings'', 30, 172–181. * Hutchins, W. J., & Somers, H. L. (1992). An introduction to machine translation (Vol. 362). London: Academic Press. * Hutchins, W. John (2006). Machine translation: history of research and use. In: ''Encyclopedia of Languages and Linguistics. 2nd edition'', edited by Keith Brown (Oxford: Elsevier 2006), vol.7, pp. 375–383
PDF, 445KB
* Autobibliography (archived)

References

Citations

External links

* (archived)
Machine Translation Archive
(archived, temporarily offline)
International Association for Machine Translation
(IAMT) 1939 births 2021 deaths Alumni of the University of Nottingham Alumni of the University of East Anglia Linguists from England {{England-linguist-stub