Conclusion
Somers' article brings into focus the state of technology in the subject of MT. In a certain measure, the reflection of Somers “despite nearly 25 years since the ALPAC report...for all the investment...perhaps one could have expected better results” should be applied not only to MT systems, but equally to NLP systems. However, this reflection of Somers should be interpreted and reevaluated in accordance with the distance between the evolution of our knowledge of the mecanisms of translatology and the ambitious objectives of producing FAHQT for more than 80% of sentences in unrestricted texts.
For the future of MT, specialists must play a double role (at the same time, scientific and economic) so as to make the right compromise at all times between language, which is a bottomless pit, and its users, who are clients with restricted R & D funds.
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Bourbeau, L.R. Current MT research orientation/disorientation. Machine Translation 7, 253–258 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00398469
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00398469