Reflections on the Russian Translation of A.M. Turing’s Paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem”

Abstract

We draw the readers’ attention to reflections on the first Russian translation of Alan Turing’s paper “On computable numbers, with an application to the Ent­scheidungsproblem” which became a classic paper on computability theory and artificial intelligence philosophy a long time ago. We highlight a longstanding tradition to incorrectly translate three pairs of terms (calculate/compute, define/​determine, and scan/observe) which play an important role for Turing. We show that the target tradition is justified by two factors: the logical and proof-computa­tional aspects of the paper are dominant over its linguistic one and an ongoing development of Turing’s ideas has been making obsolete Turing’s original expo­sition and hence its traditional translations into Russian. By proposing our vari­ants of translating for some of the above mentioned terms or by making com­ments on the traditional ones, we try to preserve the original Turing pathos in a Russian translation rather than break the said tradition down. We propose an additional argument in favor of the permanent relevance of the paper by trans­lating the informal description of the problem P vs NP which is said to be one of the central problems in modern science.