Machine Translation and the Internet

Our brief was to look at the field from the pers pective of smaller languages – both regional and minority languages and the smallest state languages . The objectives of the study were: to assess both the problems created and the opportunities offered by the Internet for the smaller and minority languages of the European Union; to consider what measures might facilitate the maximal use by European citizens of their own languages for communication and the accessing and presentation of information on the Internet; and to consider in particular the role which various systems of machine translation might play. This article will concentrate on ques tions of machine translation but it is as well to s et that dis cusss ion in the context of our general findings which are summarized here.