Abstract
With the world becoming a global village few expect (hope) that everyone will speak English within one or two generations. This is unlikely to be the case. However, the increase in communication will increase the need for automatic translation. It is unlikely that the EC will keep manually translating all its reports in all languages as the EU members become more numerous. It is quite sure that once 'acceptable quality' automatic translation is available, this will be the preferred access method to documents generated in other languages. Generic machine translation can be enhanced by optimizing the underlying grammars for certain domains and most of all by limiting the freedom of the document creator. The latter is only possible for manuals in large corporations or for documents in official organizations, but eg not for all what gets published on the web. Staying within a somewhat constrained style guarantees that the analysis in the first phase of the translation process is likely to be correct and has therefore a higher degree of success.