Eurotra: past, present and future

Ten years ago Eurotra was just an idea discussed in an expert committee created by the Commission. After scanning the market in order to find a suitable MT system the members had realised that all available operational systems were American and based on a ten-year-old state-of-the-art in linguistics and computer science. In consequence, it seemed like a good idea to try to produce a European MT system based on up-to-date scientific and technological knowledge, and a few years later the Eurotra idea was clear enough to allow for a fairly detailed presentation of the nature and composition of the system. Such a presentation was given by a member of the expert committee, Margaret King, six years ago at the Aslib conference on Practical Experience of Machine Translation.