This article is about machine translation, which is fifteen years old in Spain. Research has gone through three major stages. In 1985 a sudden outbreak of interest appeared in Spain as three transnational companies and the European Community funded the creation of several research groups. Paradoxically, 1992, which was a widely celebrated year in Spain (owing to the 5th centennial of the discovery of America and the Olympic Games held in Barcelona), marked the end of that dynamic period. At this point the methods and aims of the field were reconsidered and funding was dramatically cut. Since 1995, the growing globalization of the economy, the boom of Internet and the demand for multilingual documentation and software have renewed the interest in translation technology.