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Machine translation (MT) is a form of translation where a computer program analyses the source text and produces a target text without human intervention.

In recent years machine translation, a major goal of natural language processing, has met with limited success. Most machine translation involves some sort of human intervention, as it requires a pre-editing and a post-editing phase. Note that in machine translation, the translator supports the machine.

Tools available on the Internet, such as AltaVista's Babel Fish, and low-cost translation programs, have brought machine translation technologies to a large public. These tools produce what is called a "gisting translation" — a rough translation that gives the "gist" of the source text, but is not otherwise usable.

However, in fields with highly limited ranges of vocabulary and simple sentence structure, for example weather reports, machine translation can deliver useful results.

Engineer and futurist Raymond Kurzweil has predicted that by 2012, machine translation will be powerful enough to dominate the translation field. MIT's Technology Review also listed universal translation and interpretation as likely "within a decade" in its 2004 list. Such claims, however, have been made since the first serious forays into machine translation in the 1950s.

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