For more than forty years machine translation has been an active area of research and development. Several variants of MT systems have been proposed e.g., interactive systems, batch-mode systems requiring a large amount of human post-editing and systems that generate text in several languages from a common structured set of data rather than a source text. Although there are some successful systems and several products on the market, most translators and translation companies prefer not to use MT-systems. In this paper the authors discuss the state of affairs in the field of MT and offer an outlook on future developments. [Source: A. Matthyssen]