Do we have the real scope over Machine Translation?

The following article explains in a very objective way what will happen or what are the expectations regarding this software.  Knowing the history is as important as known why research on MT ended on 1966 and the effort to develop software based on that research continues. The importance of the topic has been exposed in several occasions, but at the end nothing clear has been settled. MT has been directly mainly, to scientific and technical content and it is clear that Literature is not a field for this software…

Machine translation over fifty years by W. John Hutchins University of East Anglia

“The history of machine translation is described from its beginnings in the 1940s to the present day. In the earliest years, efforts were concentrated either on developing immediately useful systems, however crude in their translation quality, or on fundamental research for high quality translation systems. After the ALPAC report in 1966, which virtually ended MT research in the US for more than a decade, research focused on the development of systems requiring human assistance for producing translations of technical documentation, on translation tools for direct use by translators themselves, and, in recent years, on systems for translating email, Web pages and other Internet documentation, where poor quality is acceptable in the interest of rapid results.”

PDF available for download. Find it here.