Ontwikkelingen en Problemen Bij Automatisch Vertalen

In the fifties and sixties a great deal of money and time was spent on the development of automatic translation systems. Because of the meagre results and sombre perspectives all large scale research projects were abandoned. The eighties show a renewed interest in the field of automatic translating. It is, therefore, a valid question whether old problems have been solved and new perspectives have been uncovered. A critical analysis shows that progress has been made in the domains of hardware (speed of data processing and data storage) and the organisation of data. The basic linguis-tic problems have not, however, been solved. Linguistic research that is not first and foremost directed at descriptive (instead of representational) problems and at fundamental problems such as the relation between syntax, semantics and knowledge of the world is subject to the same fate as the research into automatic translating in the fifties.