the weather forecasts of the Canadian Ministry of
Environment, (c) the human/machine coupling before, during and after
the machine translation process, that may not save money if compared to
traditional translation.

Pierre Isabelle and Patrick Andries favor "a workstation for the human
translator" more than a "robot translator": "Recent research on the
probabilist methods showed it was possible to modelize in an efficient
way some simple aspects of the translation relationship between two
texts. For example, methods were set up to calculate the correct
alignment between the text sentences and their translation, that is, to
identify the sentence(s) of the source text corresponding to each
sentence of the translation. Applied on a large scale, these techniques
can use the archives of a translation service to build a translation
memory for recycling fragments from previous translations. Such systems
are already available on the translation market (IBM Translation
Manager II, Trados Translator's Workbench by Trados, RALI TransSearch,
etc.) The latest research focuses on models that can automatically set
up correspondences at a finer level than the sentence level, i.e.
syntagms and words. The results let hope for a bunch of new tools for
the human translator, including for the study of terminology, for
dictation and translation typing, and for detectors of translation
errors."

# Comments from Randy Hobler

In September 1998, Randy Hobler was a consultant in internet marketing
at Globalink, after working for IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Burroughs
Wellcome, Pepsi, and Heublein. He wrote in an email interview: "We are
rapidly reaching the point where highly accurate machine translation of
text and speech will be so common as to be embedded in computer
platforms, and even in chips in various ways. At that point, and as the
growth of the web slows, the accuracy of language translation hits 98%
plus, and the saturation of language pairs has covered the vast
majority of the market, language transparency (any-language-to-any-
language communication) will be too limiting a vision for those selling
this technology. The next development will be 'transcultural,
transnational transparency', in which other aspects of human
communication, commerce and transactions beyond language alone will
come into play. For example, gesture has meaning, facial movement has
meaning and this varies among societies. The thumb-index finger circle
means 'O