"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 of the Canadian Ministry of Environment, 3) the human being/machine coupling before, during and after the MT process, which is not inevitably economical compared to traditional translation.
The authors favour "a workstation for the human translator" more than a "robot translator":
"The recent research on the probabilist methods permitted in fact to demonstrate that it was possible to modelize in a very efficient way some simple aspects of the translation relationship between two texts. For example, methods were set up to calculate the correct alignment between the text sentences and their translation, that is, to identify the sentence(s) of the source text which correspond(s) to each sentence of the translation. Applied on a large scale, these techniques allow the use of archives of a translation service to build a translation memory which will often permit the recycling of previous translation fragments. Such systems are already available on the translation market (IBM Translation Manager II, Trados Translator's Workbench by Trados, RALI TransSearch, etc.)
The most recent research focuses on models able to automatically set up the correspondences at a finer level than the sentence level: syntagms and words. The results obtained foresee a whole family of new tools for the human translator, including aids for terminological studying, aids for dictation and translation typing, and detectors of translation errors."