ss
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 webpage, 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."

# Comments from RALI

Despite the imminent outbreak of a universal translation machine
announced at the end of the 1940s, machine translation hasn't produced
good translations yet. Pierre Isabelle and Patrick Andries, two
scientists from the RALI Laboratory (Laboratory for Applied Research in
Computational Linguistics - Laboratoire de Recherche Appliquee en
Linguistique Informatique) in Montreal, Quebec, explain the reasons for
this failure in "La Traduction Automatique, 50 Ans Apres" (Machine
Translation, 50 Years Later), an article published in 1998 by
Multimedium, a French-language online magazine: "The ultimate goal of
building a machine capable of competing with a human translator remains
elusive due to slow progress in research. (...) Recent research, based
on large collections of texts called corpora -- using either
statistical or analogical methods -- has promised to reduce the
quantity of manual work required to build a machine translation (MT)
system, but can't promise for sure a significant improvement in the
quality of machine translation. (...) The use of MT will be more or
less restricted to tasks of information assimilation or tasks of text
distribution in restricted sub-languages."

According to Yehochua Bar-Hillel's ideas expressed in "The State of
Machine Translation", an article published in 1951, Pierre Isabelle and
Patrick Andries define three implementation strategies for machine
translation: (a) a tool of information assimilation to scan
multilingual data and supply rough translation, (b) situations of
"restricted language" such as the METEO system which, since 1977, has
translated