The paper discusses a number of important issues in speech-to-speech translation, including the key issue of level of integration of all components of such systems, based on our experience in the field since 1990. Section 1 discusses dimensions of the spoken translation problem, while current and near term approaches to spoken translation are treated in Sections 2 and 3. Section 2 describes our current expectation-based, speaker-independent, two-way translation systems, and Section 3 presents the advanced translation engine under development for handling spontaneous dialogs.