1. User’s Perspective
Laurie Gerber

2. Advantages of MT Real time Consistent Economy of scale Private
Available any time – no appointment
Advantages of MT – those features which distinguish it from human translation
Economy of scale – once you have purchased a system, all additional translation is free.
Private – whether I’m contemplating something I don’t want to share, or I’m conducting national security operations.

3. Problems with current technology
Poor interoperability with other translation tools (TM, termbases), or authoring tools (controlled language)
Poor lexicon building tools / difficult to customize
designed for linguists not lay people
high quality is achieved only with lexical customization – but labor intensive customization makes total cost of ownership too high
Cumbersome system design makes it difficult for developers to respond rapidly to client requests for customization (to work with controlled language)
Low profitability limits investment in the core technology
Other points:
MT doesn’t take advantage of the semantic information in formatting (from bolding and underlining to {SG,HT,X}ML document structure tags)
Point of competition tends to be on accumulated lexical resources (which must be carefully guarded), rather than superior language engineering.
Poor documentation (Harold Somers, AMTA 2000)

4. * Wish List * Much better pre-translation utilities
Translatability – text troubleshooting
Automated terminology extraction and encoding
Automatic topic, language, and encoding identification
Easy, fully automatic terminology interchange between MT user dictionaries and other common terminology management databases
Easy integration with document management systems including controlled language authoring
Easy customization that includes grammar as well as dictionary
Tools for user dictionary development by non-linguists
Better documentation and technical support
More “coevolution” of MT with content management and related corporate knowledge systems
The items I’m presenting here are from my own observations, and from a full day users workshop held last October at AMTA 2000.