Machine Translation (MT) has made a comeback during the 1990s. Though
systems, as to their linguistic performance, are much what they were
10 years earlier, there have been significant changes on the technical
level. Systems that were once costly and running on mainframes and expensive
workstations only are now licensed for rather modest sums to run on
personal computers. The comeback of MT has been furthered by substantial
progress in the development of auxiliary linguistic tools for text authoring
and editing, as well as for translation (machine-aided translation,
MAT). In order to achieve similar progress in MT we have to gain more
knowledge ans a better understanding of how (human and machine) translation
works. We may learn something about this from cognitive science and
translation theory. A theory of MT is only just developing. Another
primary information source is system evaluation and translation quality
assessment. MT output quality greatly varies with different formal and
content types of input. The state-of-art in the domains mentioned is
documented in this volume by individual contributions about (machine)
translation research, system development and application, performance
evaluation, and translation quality assessment. All papers are in English
with significant summaries in German. The authors are confirmed experts
in the domain, with individual accents on research and development,
teaching and training, industrial and business applications, or evaluation
and consulting.
