Recent developments in practical machine translation

Those of you who attended the 1981 conference Practical Experience of Machine Translation* may have been somewhat surprised to see how much could be said at the time by speakers who in many cases had only very limited experience of practical machine translation (MT). Many must have had their doubts about the usefulness of the systems presented, while others must have been more than just a little sceptical about the potential of MT as an aid to translators. Today we are to take a new look at the state of the art. As can be seen from the programme, a great deal has happened in the last two years. New systems have been developed, older systems have been improved, more users have emerged and a substantial amount of additional experience has been gained. Two years ago computers were still regarded by the