Microsoft's commitment to machine translation has been large-scale and sustained. The company has been involved in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research and development since 1991, specifically in Machine Translation (MT) research since 1999, and has used MT in a production environment for just over 5 years. It has pursued a strategy of pragmatic, step by step advance over the long term, building on strong in-house research in natural language processing in general, in parallel with its development work on product localization and other applications.
