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Machine aids for translators: what does the future betoken?

I was very pleased and honoured when the Conference Committee asked me to give a paper in a session devoted to the memory of Margaret Masterman. Many readers will recall with pleasure Margaret’s contributions to the Translating and the Computer Conference series and the intellectual vigour and panache with which she presented them. On those occasions she stood before us as a kindred spirit and as a pioneer in the field of computers and translation, the predominant theme in the portfolio of the Cambridge Language Research Unit. It is both heartening and fitting that Bill Williams, the new Director of Research at CLRU, has pledged to continue research and development work on this and allied topics in the unit’s recently reconstituted infrastructure and programme of research. I presented, alongside Bill Williams, a personal appreciation of Margaret’s unique contribution to the field of language and computers at Informatics 9, convened by Aslib in Cambridge. What I said on that occasion can be referred to in the published proceedings and therefore does not need to be repeated in extenso here but I would like to take the liberty of selecting a couple of brief points from that earlier address in the hope that it can set the scene for us today. Machine translation (MT) was a major professional preoccupation for Margaret. As a philosopher she saw, quite correctly, that the main effort had to be directed towards the development of methods for identifying meaning and safeguarding it against corruption during the transformation process, in which the signifiers are replaced but the signifieds are not. She was fascinated by this problem and we often talked