K' in the United States. In Argentina, it is an obscene
gesture.

When the inevitable growth of multimedia, multilingual
videoconferencing comes about, it will be necessary to 'visually edit'
gestures on the fly. The MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Media Lab, Microsoft and many others are working on computer
recognition of facial expressions, biometric access identification via
the face, etc. It won't be any good for a U.S. business person to be
making a great point in a web-based multilingual video conference to an
Argentinian, having his words translated into perfect Argentinian
Spanish if he makes the 'O' gesture at the same time. Computers can
intercept this kind of thing and edit them on the fly.

There are thousands of ways in which cultures and countries differ, and
most of these are computerizable to change as one goes from one culture
to the other. They include laws, customs, business practices, ethics,
currency conversions, clothing size differences, metric versus English
system differences, etc. Enterprising companies will be capturing and
programming these differences and selling products and services to help
the peoples of the world communicate better. Once this kind of thing is
widespread, it will truly contribute to international understanding."

= Machine translation R&D

Here is an overview of the work of four research centers, in Quebec
(RALI Laboratory), California (Natural Language Group), Switzerland
(ISSCO) and Japan (UNDL Foundation).

# RALI Laboratory

In Montreal, Quebec, the RALI Laboratory (Laboratory of Applied
Research in Computational Linguistics - Laboratoire de Recherche
Appliquee en Linguistique Informatique) has worked in automatic text
alignment, automatic text generation, automatic reaccentuation,
language identification, and finite state transducers. RALI produces
the "TransX family" of what it calls "a new generation" of translation
support tools (TransType, TransTalk, TransCheck, and TransSearch),
which are based on probabilistic translation models that automatically
calculate correspondences between the text produced by a translator and
the original text from the source language.

As explained on RALI's website in 1998: "(a) TransType speeds up the
keying-in of a translation by anticipating a translator's choices and
criticizing them when appropriate. In proposing its suggestions,
TransType takes into account both the source text and the partial
translation