This paper presents a snapshot of how the Commission's MT system (EC SYSTRAN) is used today and a glimpse of how that picture will change tomorrow. It looks in turn at: the origins of the system; how it is accessed; who requests MT and why; how users can influence the quality of output; the Rapid Post-editing Service; and the latest usage statistics, which augur well for the future. The paper closes with a look at that future, touching on the move to a new computer platform and plans for new language pairs, concluding that after twenty-five years of development, MT has become an integral part of the Commission's working environment.

This paper describes a Machine Translation (MT) evaluation experiment where emphasis is placed on the quality of output and the extent to which it is geared to different users' needs. Adopting a very specific scenario, that of a multilingual international organisation, a clear distinction is made between two user classes: translators and administrators. Whereas the first group requires MT output to be accurate and of good post-editable quality in order to produce a polished translation, the second group primarily needs informative data for carrying out other, non-linguistic tasks, and therefore uses MT more as an information-gathering and gisting tool. During the experiment, MT output of three different systems is compared in order to establish which MT system best serves the organisation's multilingual communication and information needs. This is a comparative usability- and adequacy-oriented evaluation in that it attempts to help such organisations decide which system produces the most adequate output for certain well-defined user types. To perform the experiment, criteria relating to both users and MT output are examined with reference to the ISLE taxonomy. The experiment comprises two evaluation phases, the first at sentence level, the second at overall text level. In both phases, evaluators make use of a 1-5 rating scale. Weighted results provide some insight into the systems' usability and adequacy for the purposes described above. As a conclusion, it is suggested that further research should be devoted to the most critical aspect of this exercise, namely defining meaningful and useful criteria for evaluating the post-editability and informativeness of MT output.