machinetranslation (application/pdf, 190 KB) early steps and nice overview by w. john hutchins

sputnik. the thing that really got people worried was sputnik. It was a terrible shock to the americans and they said: my god, that means that the russian technology, which we thought was - i don’t know - in the stone age or something – they can really do things and they threw money at all of these things; particular machine translation and stuff like that. but of course, you can’t deliver results instantly ... (karen spärck remembers those days)

and than came the alpac report 1966

Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC) at the instigation of sponsors of machine translation. It reported in 1966 [10] that machine translation was slower, less accurate and twice as expensive as human translation and recommended no further investment. Research in the United States suffered immediate reductions and machine translation became no longer a 'respectable' scientific pursuit.(the second period, 1954-1966: optimism and disillusion, w. john hutchins)