The purpose of this paper is to give a view of research in machine translation (MT). It is written on the assumption that readers are, in fact, more or less familiar with most of the well-known MT projects, or else can find out more about them by following up the references given. The research described here is divided into two sets: the members of the first set have in common a direct line of descent from the classical ‘second generation’ design. The second set forms a significantly different set and heterogeneous group of MT research projects – mostly rather less well known – having in common only the feature that they in some sense reject the conventional orthodoxy that typifies the first group.