Machine Translation , Ten Years On : Discourse has yet to make a breakthrough

As already mentioned, most machine translation systems perform translation sentence by sentence. But even in the case of paragraph translation, the discourse structure of the target text tends to be identical to that of the source text. However, the sublanguage discourse structures may differ across the different languages, and thus a translated text which assumes the same discourse structure as the source text may sound unnatural and perhaps disguise the true intent of the writer. Finally, the paper will outline a new approach for generating discourse structures, appropriate to the target sublanguage and will discuss some of the complicated problems encountered.