In 1954, a computer 'translated' Russian — the press declared the problem solved

The Georgetown-IBM experiment publicly translated about 60 carefully chosen Russian sentences into English using a machine with just six grammar rules and 250 words. Newspapers announced fully automatic translation was only years away; the narrow demo had oversold the technology so badly that a 1966 US government report cut off machine translation funding for over a decade.

— Standard historical accounts of computational linguistics, Georgetown-IBM experiment