ERWIN REIFLER, 1903-1965
Erwin Reifler, Professor of the Chinese Language in
the Far Eastern Department at the University of Washington,
died at the age of 61 on Friday, April 23, 1965,
in a Seattle hospital two weeks after suffering a mild
heart attack. Professor Reifler was born in Vienna, Austria,
on June 16, 1903, and was educated at the University
of Vienna, where he received his doctorate in
1931 in the field of political science. For a time he was
an editor of the Chinese New Agency for Europe and
then a member of three Chinese Government committees
visiting Germany and Austria. In 1932 he went to
China as the assistant to the Austrian Advisor to the
City Government in Shanghai. His teaching career began
shortly after his arrival in China and extended
there until 1947, involving positions in various universities
in Shanghai and Hong Kong. In 1947, while
on a trip to the United States to read a research paper
at a scholarly meeting in Washington, D. C., he accepted
an invitation to join the faculty of the University
of Washington as visiting professor. He became
associate professor in 1948 and professor in 1955.
Professor Reifler's scholarly interests were just as
varied as his general professional activities. He was
first and foremost a Chinese scholar with an excellent
command of that language. This body of knowledge
led him to the study of the historical development of
Chinese ideograms, an area to which he contributed
many original ideas. He was one of the few men in this
country to teach a course on the development of the
Chinese characters. Unraveling the semantic intricacies
of the long history of Chinese ideograms provided an
easy step for him to the study of comparative semantics,
an area to which he was practically the sole contributor.
Here he uncovered some striking parallel
semantic developments among widely divergent languages.
This cultivated interest in semantics and his
preoccupation with languages in general were fertile
ground for the implantation of the idea of translating
from one language to another by machine, an area to
which he devoted at least twelve years of research.
During the last years of his life he was primarily engaged
in research on historical metrology. His attention
was drawn to this field by his long-standing interest
in Ancient Hebrew and, specifically, by certain
deviant interpretations of measurements in the Hebrew
Bible. His research in this area promised to be capped
by a monumental work on the origin and interrelationship
of weights and measures throughout the world.
Erwin Reifler's varied scholarly pursuits and the success
with which he operated within each one clearly
attest to the superior qualities of his mind, to his imaginative
powers, and to his understanding of the research
process. Besides being a very competent scholar, Erwin
Reifler, it seems, was a problem solver par excellence.
Whereas many scholars hesitate to venture beyond
their usual sphere of activity, each new idea, each new
problem fired his imagination and drew him inexorably
into a new area. But in each sphere he was able to
orient himself quickly, put his finger on the sensitive
spots, and generate substantive research papers.
Those of us acquainted with the field of machine
translation and computational linguistics knew him as
one of the truly original pioneers in machine translation.
He was one of the recipients of Warrren Weaver's
historic memorandum Translation that appeared in
July, 1949. A number of people gave careful consideration
to the memorandum; but Erwin Reifler was
one of the few to attack the problem vigorously and
to set his thoughts down on paper, and he turned out
a veritable spate of early publications on MT. These
publications are embodied in his privately circulated
series of papers entitled simply Studies in Mechanical
Translation (SIMT) Nos. 1-8. Even in his extensive
SIMT No. 1, which appeared in April, 1951, he demonstrated
clear understanding of the problems besetting
MT, the grammatical and semantic ambiguity of
the source language and the transfer function from
source to target language, and he documented this
understanding with useful examples from a plurality of
languages. Not only did he see the problems; he also
made significant contributions towards their solution.
His SIMT series contained many valuable and imaginative
discussions of pre-editors, post-editors, mechanical
determination of incident non-grammatical and
grammatical meaning by use of "pinpointers" and "pinpointees",
mechanical dictionaries, form-class storage in
such dictionaries, and mechanical determination of the
constituents of German substantive compounds.
Erwin Reifler's own research and zeal soon influenced
others at the University of Washington. In May,
1956, the University of Washington Machine Translation
Project under sponsorship of the U.S. Air Force,
a joint research effort of the Far Eastern Department
and the Department of Electrical Engineering, was
initiated under Reifler's directorship. Here his previous
research bore fruit first in direct application to RussianEnglish
MT from 1956 to 1960 and, subsequently, in
application to Chinese-English MT from 1961 to 1963
under sponsorship of the National Science Foundation.
Professor Reifler's publications in the field of MT continued
through the year 1961 and are best represented
by his writings in, and his editing of, Linguistic and
Engineering Studies in Automatic Language Translation
of Scientific Russian into English, Phase I and
Phase II, 1958 and 1960, University of Washington
Press, Seattle. LEW R. MICKLESEN
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