This paper presents a description of the well-known family of machine translation systems, PARS. PARS was developed in the USSR as long ago as in 1989, and, since then, it has passed a difficult way from a mainframe based, somewhat bulky system to a modern PC-oriented product. At the same time, we understand well that, as any machine translation software, PARS is not artificial intelligence, and it is only capable of generating what is called 'draft translation.' It is certainly useful, but can by no means be considered a kind of substitution for a human translator whenever high-quality translation is required.