Science and Technology in Machine Translation

The major question to be addressed here is the conditions under which MT can be considered scientific. Before this question can be meaningfully discussed, a number of preliminary issues should be settled. They include the distinction between applied science and other kinds of science, the distinction between applied science and technology, and the epistemological and practical consequences of these distinctions (section 1). In section 2, the problem of MT is analysed in such a way that some general choices which have to be made stand out clearly. Each of these choices may influence the character of the approach to MT in terms of the distinction between (applied) science and technology. In section 3, one of the choices, determining the boundaries of the problem to be solved, is taken up for closer analysis. It has been chosen because its influence on the scientific nature of the approach, though pervasive, is not immediately obvious.