Machine translation (MT) is one of the major research fi elds of natural language processing (NLP), and it always spearheads the research frontier in NLP. In this paper, after a systematic survey of the development history of MT from a macroscopic perspective, with particular emphasis on the main development path of underlying methodologies and core technologies in MT, we drew a general picture of the milestones that marked the key points of a long journey for both theoretical study and practical accomplishment for the past seven decades. The latest fruitful development achieved in the area of MT application shows that, the paradigm shift from the tradi-tional linguistic rule-based approaches to the so-called empirical approach, based on increasingly available amounts of “raw data” in the form of massive collections of texts and their translations, compounded by the phenomenal advancement of computer technology, will become the driving force that will potentially lead to the breakthrough in MT. Based on the above observation and analysis, some sug-gestions on the short-term development strategy for machine translation as well as natural language processing in China are proposed.%本文试图从超脱细节的宏观角度，对机器翻译的发展历程进行扼要的总结和深刻的评介，着重于刻画各个时期在基本方法和核心技术上的主要特征，从而勾勒出机器翻译的全过程演进脉络。在上述考察和分析的基础上，文章对国内机器翻译乃至自然语言处理研究的近期发展策略提出了若干建议。
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