Why is machine translation (MT) quickly becoming a critical strategic tool for accessing and competing in a globalized marketplace?

1. Because 20% of all web sites were multilingual in the year 2000 which will grow to over 50% of all commercial web sites by the year 2008.

2. Because over 50% of internet users will be entering the internet each day using a language other than English. This group of non-English users is expected to grow to over 80% of the total internet users by 2008.

3. Because, according to Gartner Group, buyers are 300% more likely to linger, shop and buy in a web site that is written in the buyer's home language.

4. Because an increasing portion of each B2B and B2C e-commerce and new media web sites are dynamic (changing content frequently) and by 2008, a typical multilingual web site will have more dynamic content than static (rarely changing) content.

5. Human translation is just too slow (2,000 to 3000 words a day) and expensive (20 U.S. cents to 60 U.S. cents per word) for translation of dynamic content in spite of its higher level of accuracy compared to machine translation, which is fast (real-time at 2,500 up to 15,000 words per minute), cheap (free to up to 4 U.S. cents per word) and accurate enough to "get the gist".

6. Machine Translation is sufficiently accurate and good enough in terms of quality in order to conduct most business conversations and execute an e-commerce transaction.