CompuServe looking at MT

“CompuServe,” says Director of Development Cole Harrison, “is investigating the possibility of whether draft-quality, non-postedited MT output could be of interest to our users – and economic for us to provide. We hope that MT can help us make our content available in various languages and allow the increasing number of users in foreign countries to communicate with our English-speaking members and access online information in English. Our initial focus will be English-to-German.” Coleman says CompuServe does not intend to build a new MT system but rather to enhance an existing system and apply it to the “emerging environment of information-only translation.”
    Since its origins in the 1970s as a private time-sharing network, CompuServe has evolved into a vast conglomerate of online facilities, defying easy description. With more than a million users, it is also the most popular online service in the world. If CompuServe ever implements MT, it would certainly expose this technology to a far wider public than ever before.