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 When the swine flu outbreak hit Mexico last April, the public reaction was timid and indifferent. After one week, the outbreak reached the United States then Canada. By the end of April, 11 countries were affected by this new “deadly” virus. A status of confusion invaded the world.
The new emerging global threat occupied the media headlines across the globe. The fact that its name has changed three times (influenza-like illness, swine flu, influenza A(H1N1))* in less than one week shows how "new" this monster is. The frenetic public started storming internet sites for potential news.
Specialized web sites have encountered severe technical difficulties due to the huge amount of traffic. Some sites have witnessed millions of hits per day, coming from the four corners of the globe and causing them to crash for hours. ...
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 In September 1301, the king of Aragon, James II, wrote urgently to his treasurer commanding him to get the royal "Librum medicine vocatum Avicenne" out of pawn. He had allowed his favourite surgeon to pawn the volume with a Barcelona merchant for 500 sueldos, but now he found a "valda necessarium" and had to have it back.
Five hundred sueldos was an enormous amount, the price of fifty meters of Persian cloth, of a good mule or of a horse and not even the royal treasury always found such sums easy to produce. The king had to repeat his order for the book''s redemption for months to come. This volume, on which the king placed so much store, can only have been Avicenna''s Canon, the great medical encyclopedia of Ibn Sina, translated into Latin in the twelfth century.* ...
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 Translation is the complex process of transferring the components of a message from one language and culture into another language and culture. These components can be in the form of "language" (most of the time) or colors, shapes, sounds, etc. For the transfer process to succeed, all ingredients of the original message should be clear and well defined.
The author is responsible for the clarity of the components of his document. This should be taken into account regardless whether the document is going to be translated or not. The biggest problem of any translation process is when some of the original components are ambiguous. The translator cannot translate when he doesn't understand what he has in front of his eyes; this is when he starts making assumptions, leading to bad translation quality of course. ...
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 In 1964, the U.S. Government established the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC) to evaluate the progress of Computational Linguistics and the potentials of Machine Translation (MT).
After two years of research, the seven scientists-Committee issues its famous report questioning the results achieved in the field of MT and calling for more research in Computational Linguistics. The recommendations of the Committee lead the U.S. Government to reduce seriously its funding.
This was a huge blow for this 10 years old emerging science. Ever since, MT had difficulties getting back on its feet. But MT advocates didn't loose hope and the research continued. ...
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Read this first: Who is reading your text?
 Unless we spread the awareness of the existence of Machine Translation (MT), no progress can be made in this domain. Collaboration between writers and MT is vital for the latter to succeed.
From here, let's encourage web writers and authors to tailor their texts according to the basic needs of MT. Once the text is polished and prepared for MT, authors can then tell their readers that their pages are "Machine Translation Friendly", or "Machine Translation Ready". For this purpose, adding a small etiquette will distinguish your friendly site from other unfriendly sites and your particular content from the rest of content. ...
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