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The dream of a universal translation device goes back many decades, long before Douglas Adams´s fictional Babel fish provided this service in The Hitchhiker´s Guide to the Galaxy. Since the advent of computers, research has focused on the design of digital machine translation tools - computer programs capable of automatically translating a text from a source language to a target language. This has become one of the most fundamental tasks of artificial intelligence. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a concise, nontechnical overview of the development of machine translation, including the different approaches, evaluation issues, and market potential. The main approaches are presented from a largely historical perspective and in an intuitive manner, allowing the reader to understand the main principles without knowing the mathematical details.

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Thierry Poibeau is Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, Head of the LATTICE (Langues, Textes, Traitements Informatiques et Cognition) Laboratory, and Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge.

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