e and automatically generates the
corresponding text in the target language. With the lack of any human
intervention during the translation process, machine translation (MT)
differs from computer-assisted translation (CAT), which involves some
interaction between the translator and the computer.

As explained on the website of SYSTRAN, a company specializing in
translation software, "machine translation software translates one
natural language into another natural language. MT takes into account
the grammatical structure of each language and uses rules to transfer
the grammatical structure of the source language (text to be
translated) into the target language (translated text). MT cannot
replace a human translator, nor is it intended to."

The website of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT)
gives the following definition: "Machine translation (MT) is the
application of computers to the task of translating texts from one
natural language to another. One of the very earliest pursuits in
computer science, MT has proved to be an elusive goal, but today a
number of systems are available which produce output which, if not
perfect, is of sufficient quality to be useful for certain specific
applications, usually in the domain of technical documentation. In
addition, translation software packages which are designed primarily to
assist the human translator in the production of translations are
enjoying increasing popularity within professional translation
organizations."

Machine translation is the earliest type of natural language
processing, as stated on the website of Globalink, a company offering
language translation software and services: "From the very beginning,
machine translation (MT) and natural language processing (NLP) have
gone hand-in-hand with the evolution of modern computational
technology. The development of the first general-purpose programmable
computers during World War II was driven and accelerated by Allied
cryptographic efforts to crack the German Enigma machine and other
wartime codes. Following the war, the translation and analysis of
natural language text provided a testbed for the newly emerging field
of Information Theory.

During the 1950s, research on Automatic Translation (known today as
Machine Translation, or 'MT') took form in the sense of literal
translation, more commonly known as word-for-word translations, without
the use of any linguistic rules. The Russian project