Review of John Lehrberger, Laurent Bourbeau, Machine Translation: Linguistic Characteristics of MT Systems and General Methodology of Evaluation, 1988, John Benjamins Publishing Co.

The Machine Translation (MT) field has reason to be concerned about user evaluations of its product. The 1966 ALPAC report, which concluded that contemporary MT systems were not cost-effective compared to manual translation, had a catastrophic effect on funding in the field. Because MT is regarded as more of an 'engineering' discipline than other parts of computational linguistics, decisions about the quality of MT research will fall disproportionately to users of delivered systems.