e the opportunities. Such
as:

SYSTRAN has partnered with AltaVista and reports between 500,000 and 600,000
visitors a day on babelfish.altavista.digital.com, and about 1 million
translations per day -- ranging from recipes to complete Web pages.

About 15,000 sites link to babelfish, which can translate to and from French,
Italian, German, Spanish and Portuguese. The site plans to add Japanese soon.

'The popularity is simple. With the Internet, now there is a way to use US
content. All of these contribute to this increasing demand,' said Dimitros
Sabatakakis, group CEO of SYSTRAN, speaking from his Paris home.

Alis technology powers the Los Angeles Times' soon-to-be launched language
translation feature on its site. Translations will be available in Spanish and
French, and eventually, Japanese. At the click of a mouse, an entire web page
can be translated into the desired language.

Globalink offers a variety of software and Web translation possibilities,
including a free e-mail service and software to enable text in chat rooms to be
translated.

But while these so-called 'machine' translations are gaining worldwide
popularity, company execs admit they're not for every situation.

Representatives from Globalink, Alis and SYSTRAN use such phrases as 'not
perfect' and 'approximate' when describing the quality of translations, with the
caveat that sentences submitted for translation should be simple, grammatically
accurate and idiom-free.

'The progress on machine translation is moving at Moore's Law -- every 18 months
it's twice as good,' said Vin Crosbie, a Web industry analyst in Greenwich,
Conn. 'It's not perfect, but some [non-English speaking] people don't realize
I'm using translation software.'

With these translations, syntax and word usage suffer, because dictionary-driven
databases can't decipher between homonyms -- for example, 'light' (as in the sun
or light bulb) and 'light' (the opposite of heavy).

Still, human translation would cost between $50 and $60 per Web page, or about
20 cents per word, SYSTRAN's Sabatakakis said.

While this may be appropriate for static 'corporate information' pages, the
machine translations are free on the Web, and often less than $100 for software,
depending on the number of translated languages and special features."

4.3. Computer-Assisted Translation

Within the World Health Organization (WHO), Geneva, Switzerland, the
Computer-assisted Translation and Ter