ons and
governments, from a stand-alone product giving a fast draft translation
to a full system managing professional translations.

As explained on the company website in 1998, "with Globalink's
translation applications, the computer uses three sets of data: the
input text, the translation program and permanent knowledge sources
(containing a dictionary of words and phrases of the source language),
and information about the concepts evoked by the dictionary and rules
for sentence development. These rules are in the form of linguistic
rules for syntax and grammar, and some are algorithms governing verb
conjugation, syntax adjustment, gender and number agreement and word
re-ordering. Once the user has selected the text and set the machine
translation process in motion, the program begins to match words of the
input text with those stored in its dictionary. Once a match is found,
the application brings up a complete record that includes information
on possible meanings of the word and its contextual relationship to
other words that occur in the same sentence. The time required for the
translation depends on the length of the text. A three-page, 750-word
document takes about three minutes to render a first draft
translation."

At the headquarters of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva,
Switzerland, the Computer-assisted Translation and Terminology Unit
(CTT) has been a pioneer since 1997 in assessing technical options for
using computer-assisted translation (CAT) systems based on translation
memory (TM). With such systems, translators can access previous
translations from portions of the text; accept, reject or modify them;
and add the new translation to the memory, thus enriching it for future
reference. By archiving the daily output, the translator helps in
building an extensive translation memory and in solving a number of
translation issues. Several projects have been under way at the CTT for
electronic document archiving and retrieval, bilingual/multilingual
text alignment, computer-assisted translation, translation memory and
terminology database management, and speech recognition.

The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) in Washington, D.C. has
developed its own machine translation software, as a common work from
its own computational linguists, translators, and system programmers.
The PAHO Translation Unit has used SPANAM (Spanish to English) from
1980 and ENGSPAN (English to Spanish) from 1985, t