Warren Weaver

Warren Weaver (July 17, 1894 – November 24, 1978)[1] was an American scientist, mathematician, and science administrator.[2] He is widely recognized as one of the pioneers of machine translation and as an important figure in creating support for science in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Weaver

• Said to be probably the single most influential publication in the early days of machine translation, it formulated goals and methods before most people had any idea of what computers might be capable of, and was the direct stimulus for the beginnings of research first in the United States and then later, indirectly, throughout the world. The impact of Weaver's memorandum is attributable not only to his widely recognized expertise in mathematics and computing, but also, and perhaps even more, to the influence he enjoyed with major policy-makers in U.S. government agencies.
• Weaver was fascinated by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In 1964, having built up a collection of 160 versions in 42 languages, Weaver wrote a book about the translation history of Alice, called Alice in Many Tongues: The Translations of Alice in Wonderland.[14] Among other features, it provides excerpts from the business correspondence of the author, Lewis Carroll (the Reverend Charles Dodgson), dealing with publishing royalties and permissions as Alice's fame snowballed worldwide. Ever the scientist, even in the area of literature, Weaver devised a design for evaluating the quality of the various translations, focusing on the nonsense, puns and logical jokes in the Mad Tea-Party scene. His range of contacts provided an impressive if eccentric list of collaborators in the evaluation exercise, including anthropologist Margaret Mead (for the South Pacific Pidgin translation), longtime Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek, and Nobel laureate biochemist Hugo Theorell (Swedish). The book Alice in a World of Wonderlands (2015) continues and updates Weaver's endeavour, analyzing Alice translations in 174 languages in a similar vein.