e, explains on its
website:

"Machine translation software translates one natural language into another
natural language. MT takes into account the grammatical structure of each
language and uses rules to transfer the grammatical structure of the source
language (text to be translated) into the target language (translated text). MT
cannot replace a human translator, nor is it intended to."

The European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT) gives the following
definition:

"Machine translation (MT) is the application of computers to the task of
translating texts from one natural language to another. One of the very earliest
pursuits in computer science, MT has proved to be an elusive goal, but today a
number of systems are available which produce output which, if not perfect, is
of sufficient quality to be useful for certain specific applications, usually in
the domain of technical documentation. In addition, translation software
packages which are designed primarily to assist the human translator in the
production of translations are enjoying increasing popularity within
professional translation organizations."

Machine translation is the earliest type of natural language processing. Here
are the explanations given by Globalink:

"From the very beginning, machine translation (MT) and natural language
processing (NLP) have gone hand-in-hand with the evolution of modern
computational technology. The development of the first general-purpose
programmable computers during World War II was driven and accelerated by Allied
cryptographic efforts to crack the German Enigma machine and other wartime
codes. Following the war, the translation and analysis of natural language text
provided a testbed for the newly emerging field of Information Theory.

During the 1950s, research on Automatic Translation (known today as Machine
Translation, or 'MT') took form in the sense of literal translation, more
commonly known as word-for-word translations, without the use of any linguistic
rules.

The Russian project initiated at Georgetown University in the early 1950s
represented the first systematic attempt to create a demonstrable machine
translation system. Throughout the decade and into the 1960s, a number of
similar university and government-funded research efforts took place in the
United States and Europe. At the same time, rapid developments in the field of
Theoretical Linguistics, culminating in the publication of Noam Cho