The inflexible fickleness of fashion

One problem with the field of MT has been that the descriptive work is, frankly, rather monotonous and boring. This is why attempts were made either to make it less boring (by adding an independently motivated theoretical angle to the descriptive work), or to try to avoid it altogether. The latter objective manifested itself in attempts to use Al learning techniques or more practical semi-automatic procedures for knowledge acquisition, and the application of statistical methods for establishing cross-linguistic correspondences in lieu of language-description work.