The
world of computers has so far been dominated by English
but, with the advent of the World Wide Web, this is becoming
less true by the day. It has been predicted that by 2005
more than 50% of information available through the web will
not be in English.
Machine translation (MT) is one of the oldest
areas of Artificial Intelligence. It has had its up and
downs but interest is currently at an all-time high and
large strides have been made in improving the quality of
translation, to the point where many organizations find
it useful to use MT to provide at least a first pass at
translating into or from a foreign language. Several translation
engines (of highly variable quality) are also available
on the web for the casual user and a multitude of personal
software can be bought for little money.
In this talk I will review briefly the field
of MT, describe several approaches that have been developed
over the years, and discuss their strong points and weaknesses.
I will also consider different applications of MT and the
quality requirements of each application. The goal is to
give the audience a broad overview of the field of MT and
its current status. Time permitting, I will also describe
in some detail specific research and development projects
that I have been involved in.
