The use of machine translation as a tool for professional or other highly skilled translators is for the most part currently limited to post-editing arrangements in which the translator invokes MT when desired and then manually cleans up the results. A theoretically promising but hitherto largely unsuccessful alternative to post editing for this application is interactive machine translation (IMT), in which the translator and MT system work in tandem. The authors argue that past failures to make IMT viable as a tool for skilled translators have been the result of an infelicitous mode of interaction rather than any inherent flaw in the idea. As a solution, they propose a new style of IMT in which the target text under construction serves as the medium of communication between an MT system and its user. The paper describes design, implementation, and performance of an automatic word completion system for a translator that is intended to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, albeit in a very rudimentary form.