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In 1953, a teenage girl, Jeanne Saré, jumps in front of a train at the Gare du Nord station. She leaves behind writings that to some are unreadable, but to others tell universal, unspoken truths about the lives and struggles of women. When published in the 1970s, her work triggers a rash of copycat suicides. It is hastily withdrawn from sale and eventually forgotten about.

The dream of a universal translation device goes back many decades, long before Douglas Adams's fictional Babel fish provided this service in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Since the advent of computers, research has focused on the design of digital machine translation tools - computer programs capable of automatically translating a text from a source language to a target language. This has become one of the most fundamental tasks of artificial intelligence.

R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) is a science-fiction drama that was first presented in Czech in 1921. It introduced the term "robot", which is derived from a Czech word meaning "worker," to international vocabulary. The action opens in a factory that has successfully produced thousands of robots, who are essentially mindless drones. An idealistic humanitarian activist launches a plan to imbue some of the robots with human traits. The robots which have been humanized then assume leadership over the other robots and seek to organize them in a revolution to take over the world.