<b>A concise, nontechnical overview of the development of machine translation, including the different approaches, evaluation issues, and major players in the industry.</b><p>The dream of a universal translation device goes back many decades, long before Douglas Adams''s fictional Babel fish provided this service in <i>The Hitchhiker''s Guide to the Galaxy</i>. 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 und