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True:

MT is useful. The METEO  system has been in daily use since 1977. As of 1990, it was regularly translating around 45 000 words daily. In the 1980s, The diesel engine manufacturers Perkins Engines  was saving around £ 4000 and up to 15 weeks on each manual translated.

True:

While MT systems sometimes produce howlers, there are many situations where the ability of MT systems to produce reliable, if less than perfect, translations at high speed is valuable.

True:

In some circumstances, MT systems can produce good quality  output: less than 4% of METEO  output requires any correction by human translators at all (and most of these are due to transmission errors in the original texts). Even where the quality  is lower, it is often easier and cheaper to revise `draft quality' MT output than to translate entirely by hand.

True:

MT does not threaten translators' jobs. The need for translation is vast and unlikely to diminish, and the limitations of current MT systems are too great. However, MT systems can take over some of the boring, repetitive translation jobs and allow human translation to concentrate on more interesting tasks, where their specialist skills are really needed.

True:

Speech-to-Speech MT is still a research topic. In general, there are many open research problems to be solved before MT systems will be come close to the abilities of human translators.

True:

Not only are there are many open research problems in MT, but building an MT system is an arduous and time consuming job, involving the construction of grammars and very large monolingual and bilingual dictionaries. There is no `magic solution' to this.

True:

In practice, before an MT system becomes really useful, a user will typically have to invest a considerable amount of effort in customizing it.

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