Universal translater still years away.

During the 1950s, computer pioneers thought machine translation (MT) would be easy, a mere engineering effort. Early euphoria has turned to frustration, however.

The demand for faster translation is exploding increasingly in international business relations. The European Community employs more than 2,000 full-time translators for nine languages. Yet. many companies quietly have withdrawn their MT projects. That leaves a firm such as Apple Computer to hire local translation companies to produce manuals in 21 languages for its European market alone.

"Machine translation is in a pitiful state," reports Martin Kay, professor of linguistics, Stanford University. Some computational linguists have shown that translations require knowledge about the real world, and the meaning conveyed by a word often is encoded implicitly in the context. Human hearers understand it by including information from previous words into their interpretation of whatever follows.

Consider the sentence, "John got himself into this mess, and he must get himself out of it." There seems little room for confusion, but suppose this were translated from Finnish, which has no gender distinctions in its pronouns. An entirely possible translation is: "John got himself into this mess, and she must get herself out of it."

The feeling that "he" is overwhelmingly more likely comes not from any linguistic properties, but from common-sense knowledge that the...