In 1964, the U.S. Government established the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC) to evaluate the progress of Computational Linguistics and the potentials of Machine Translation (MT). After two years of research, the seven scientists-Committee issues its famous report questioning the results achieved in the field of MT and calling for more research in Computational Linguistics. The recommendations of the Committee led the U.S. Government to reduce seriously its funding.
This was a huge blow for this 10 years old emerging science. Ever since, MT had difficulties getting back on its feet. But MT advocates didn't loose hope and the research continued.
Any piece of text you put on the web automatically becomes available for the readers. Traditional web readers used to be you, me and all the people around us; but it is not the case anymore.
Now you have to expect that your pages are read by other "creatures" which are looking for your thoughts and products.
We are not talking about aliens here, but about new type of "eyes" scanning your site. The fact that your site is findable on the web means that something came to your site and brought it to the surface; this is no new information, everyone now knows what a "search engine" does. But what is news is the fact that there is a very fast growing monster invading the web and it is being unfortunately ignored completely: Online Machine Translation Systems!
Translation is the complex process of transferring the components of a message from one language and culture into another language and culture. These components can be in the form of "language" (most of the time) or colors, shapes, sounds, etc. For the transfer process to succeed, all ingredients of the original message should be clear and well defined.
The future of multilingualism and the success of multilingual communication rely on the progress made in the field of Automatic Translation, or Machine Translation (MT). Unless we spread the awareness of the existence of MT, no progress can be made in this domain. Collaboration between writers and MT specialists is vital.
