We can trace the idea of Machine Translation back to the 17th century, in the work of René Descartes. But it’s the 1970s which saw Machine Translation used for its actual purpose, initially in institutions like the European Commission, and later at big corporations. The advent of the Internet sped up the evolution of MT significantly and resulted in advanced technologies like today’s Statistical Machine Translation.
In software localization, we can use Machine Translation (or Automatic Translation) in a number of processes.