  We are exploring the historical significance of research in the field of
machine translation conducted by Bulcsu Laszlo, Croatian linguist, who was a
pioneer in machine translation in Yugoslavia during the 1950s. We are focused
on two important seminal papers written by members of his research group from
1959 and 1962, as well as their legacy in establishing a Croatian machine
translation program based around the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
of the University of Zagreb in the late 1950s and early 1960s. We are exploring
their work in connection with the beginnings of machine translation in the USA
and USSR, motivated by the Cold War and the intelligence needs of the period.
We also present the approach to machine translation advocated by the Croatian
group in Yugoslavia, which is different from the usual logical approaches of
the period, and his advocacy of cybernetic methods, which would be adopted as a
canon by the mainstream AI community only decades later.
