🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Mar23.060046.22639@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu> spcoltri@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu (Steve Coltrin) writes (in response to a request for PC-based machine
translation software):

>lodzins@pilot.njin.net (Dean Lodzinski) writes:
>>There is such a program out, but unfortunately I forget the name.  I
>>have seen the program advertised in PC Computing and in the Selective
>>Software catalog.  The list price is $79.  There is also versions that
>>do English to Spanish, French and Italian.
>
>	I would expect this to be a computerized E/G dictionary.  The present
>state-of-the-art machine English/German translator can only handle text
>containing very simple grammatical structures and a narrow vocabulary
>(scientific terms and little else).

I have no doubt that Steve Coltrin is very close to being perfectly correct
in his response, and I will add just a bit more information.  If you carefully
read the promotional blurbs associated with the Translator's Assistant soft-
ware (and the promo stuff associated with similar products) you will not see
any bold claims about translation of natural language texts. Instead, you will 
encounter phrases like "your key to translation," "your translator's assist-
ant," etc.  Based purely on an evaluation of the output of such systems, the 
technology is nearly indistinguishable from the type of system reported in 
A.G. Oettinger's 1954 dissertation at Harvard--maybe with a little added
sophistication, but not much surpassing the state-of-the-art as of the 1966
ALPAC apocalypse. However, the current state-of-the-art is much more sophis-
ticated than it was during that period. But for $79 you get software like that
described above; for state-of-the-art English to German MT, you'll need to
invest heavily in order to finance it, and it won't run on a PC. Not yet.