RECENT TRENDS IN MACHINE TRANSLATION
Muriel Vasconcellos, Libby Miller · 1996
In the last two years machine translation (MT) has embarked on a voyage into the future, spurred by the presence of personal computers on individual desktops throughout the world and, more recently, universal access to electronic text on-line. This impressive growth has led to many new trends, including major changes in the profile of the user. Apace with this trajectory has come better communication and increased collaboration between all the groups concerned--MT researchers, developers, users, and watchers. The International Association for Machine Translation (IAMT), together with its three regional associations created in 1991, has fostered this convergence by creating opportunities--workshops, conferences, publications--through which to share the latest information in this dynamically growing field. 1 New Dimensions in MT Service Delivery 1.1 Overview The dreams of yesteryear's visionaries are finally coming true. Machine translation (MT) has launched on an unparalleled surge of growth--a historic shift in the way it is being used and a phenomenal increase in the number of people who rely on it. We now have MT software that is viable, affordable, and runs on virtually any 1990s desktop. Today there are more than 500 vendors of MT software for the personal computer around the world, and among them they put out well over 1,000 products. 3 One of the vendors, Globalink, sells its extensive line of software in at least 6,000 stores in North America alone, and at present Europe is its fastest-growing market. The ubiquity of the desktop computer with access to the Internet has given momentum to an unprecedented growth in MT usership. We now have MT on-line, accessible through e-mail, client-server arrangements, Internet service providers, and a growing number of other sites on the Internet. The on-line phenomenon is changing our whole way of thinking about machine translation. Together, these two developments--the abundance of low-cost MT in shrink-wrapped boxes, coupled with MT on-line--are turning machine translation into an everyday commodity that is within the reach of virtually anyone with a late-model personal computer. The sudden shift in MT use and the dramatic increase in its usership have also brought a sea change in the profile of the user. Because of its widespread availability, MT has been forced, appropriately or not, to graduate from the days when a system's caretakers had to nurture it constantly in order for it to perform acceptably. It now stands on its own, and, by and large, its new users must fend for themselves, whether by