Electronic meetings, e.g., chat rooms and bulletin boards, can be more efficient and effective than traditional, oral discussions, but until only recently, online groups speaking many languages could not benefit from machine translation (MT). Although it is possible for linguists to provide translations for the group members as they read comments during a multilingual discussion, this is not feasible for large groups and many languages. As a solution, we propose a fully automated multilingual meeting system, and an example of its use in a meeting with comments typed in English translated to Dutch and Russian illustrates its potential to reduce many multinational communication barriers.

"What is Machine Translation? Machine translation (MT) is the application of computers to the task of translating texts from one natural language to another. One of the very earliest pursuits in computer science, MT has proved to be an elusive goal, but today a number of systems are available which produce output which, if not perfect, is of sufficient quality to be useful in a number of specific domains." A definition from the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT), "an organization that serves the growing community of people interested in MT and translation tools, including users, developers, and researchers of this increasingly viable technology."

Me Translate Pretty One Day - Spanish to English? French to Russian? Computers haven't been up to the task. But a New York firm with an ingenious algorithm and a really big dictionary is finally cracking the code. By Evan Ratliff. Wired (December 2006; Issue 14.12). "Jaime Carbonell, chief science officer of Meaningful Machines, hunches over his laptop in the company's midtown Manhattan offices, waiting for it to decode a message from the perpetrators of a grisly terrorist attack. Running software that took four years and millions of dollars to develop, Carbonell's machine -- or rather, the server farm it's connected to a few miles away -- is attempting a task that has bedeviled computer scientists for half a century. The message isn't encrypted or scrambled or hidden among thousands of documents. It's simply written in Spanish:.... Language translation is a tricky problem, not only for a piece of software but also for the human mind."

• After you read the article, be sure to visit Meaningful Machines, The Language Technologies Institute (LTI) at Carnegie Mellon University, and The Center for Computational Learning Systems (CCLS) at Columbia University.