minology (Unit (CTT) is assessing technical
options for using computer-assisted translation (CAT) systems based on
"translation memory". With such systems, translators have immediate access to
previous translations of portions of the text before them. These reminders of
previous translations can be accepted, rejected or modified, and the final
choice is added to the memory, thus enriching it for future reference. By
archiving daily output, the translator would soon have access to an enormous
"memory" of ready-made solutions for a considerable number of translation
problems. Several projects are currently under way in such areas as electronic
document archiving and retrieval, bilingual/multilingual text alignment,
computer-assisted translation, translation memory and terminology database
management, and speech recognition.

Contrary to the imminent outbreak of the universal translation machine announced
some 50 years ago, the machine translation systems don't yet produce good
quality translations. Why not? Pierre Isabelle and Patrick Andries, from the
Laboratoire de recherche appliquee en linguistique informatique (RALI)
(Laboratory for Applied Research in Computational Linguistics) in Montreal,
Quebec, explain this failure in La traduction automatique, 50 ans apres (Machine
translation, 50 years later), an article published in the Dossiers of the daily
cybermagazine Multimedium:

"The ultimate goal of building a machine capable of competing with a human
translator remains elusive due to the slow progress of the research. [...]
Recent research, based on large collections of texts called corpora - using
either statistical or analogical methods - promise to reduce the quantity of
manual work required to build a MT [machine translation] system, but it is less
sure than they can promise a substantial improvement in the quality of machine
translation. [...] the use of MT will be more or less restricted to information
assimilation tasks or tasks of distribution of texts belonging to restricted
sub-languages."

According to Yehochua Bar-Hillel's ideas expressed in The State of Machine
Translation, an article published in 1951, Pierre Isabelle and Patrick Andries
define three MT implementation strategies: 1) a tool of information assimilation
to scan multilingual information and supply rough translation, 2) situations of
"restricted language" such as the METEO system which, since 1977, has been
translating the weather forecasts