Eurotra: A European perspective on MT

This paper describes the perspective on Machine Translation taken in the Eurotra project: an R & D project of the European Communities at a relatively early stage. It describes: i) the project's rather challenging aims; ii) the framework of design principles and linguistic and software methodology which are of particular importance given its size, scope, and organization; iii) the proposed representational theories and expressive (programming) languages with which actual instances of MT systems can be constructed. The final section sketches some recent proposals and directions for future research.