This paper, accompanied by peer group commentary and author's response, is a discussion paper concerning the state of the art in Machine Translation. The current orthodoxy is first summarized, then criticized. A number of research projects based on the standard architecture are discussed: they involve the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques, advanced linguistic theories, and sublanguage. Alternative approaches discussed are systems which develop or update their grammars semi-automatically, dialogue MT, and corpus-based MT including example-based and statistical approaches.