@ henri masson

J’ai retrouvé la citation sur la traduction par odinateur est l’esperanto.

According to an unconfirmed rumour, on the occasion of a prestigious machine translation conference held in Japan in 1989, a senior representative of a major Japanese computer manufacturer reported that his company had sold X number of machine translation systems and he proudly added that 10 per cent are actually used. This cannot make sense unless 90 per cent of the customers buy machine-translation systems like Van Gogh paintings : for prestige.

True or untrue, the story may well confirm that a trade as uncertain as machine translation, with its extremely long payback periods, is indeed sensitive to prestige considerations. It could therefore seem risky to include in a machine translation project a language like Esperanto which has the unmerited but undeniable quality that the mere mentioning of its name calls forth the most emotional rejections from both laymen and linguists (Forster 1987 ; Piron 1987).

Despite all this, the idea of using Esperanto in machine translation is almost as old as the attempts to make computers translate. In recent years, the idea has become a reality, and I shall here address the question, ‘what is so special about Esperanto that a prestige-sensitive software company chose to adopt it ?’.

titre : Computers in Translation : A Practical Appraisal

auteur : Book by John Newton ; Routledge, 1992

page 78