Machine Translation in Europe

Whereas in the United States work in machine translation (MT) has only recently been reinstated as a 'respectable' natural language processing (NLP) application, it has long been considered a worthwhile and interesting topic for research and development in both Europe and Japan. In terms of number of projects in one sub-field of computational linguistics, MT is currently perhaps the most important application. 1 One obvious reason for this is simply the daily awareness that people communicate in languages other than English, a situation that naturally encourages an interest in translation. On a practical level, for example, every television cable system in Europe broadcasts stations from numerous countries, and on the political level, the European Community (EC) is committed to protecting the language of each of the Member States, which implies providing numerous translation services. From an economic viewpoint, every company knows that in order to market its products, the documentation must be in the language of the target country. And a last motivation for interest in MT, which was also the origin of MT activities in the US and an important concern for Japan, is the desire for better access to information--important documents often exist in some foreign language.