Machine translation (MT) was historically one of the first tasks that were imagined as application of NLP as early as in the 40's, and remains one that still resists the progress of science. Indeed, current MT systems remain often very poor compared with human translation. In the same time the potential economic rewards linked with the development of MT systems are huge, especially in non English-speaking countries. As a result, Japanese investments in the discipline are colossal and MT softwares from all major computer manufacturers succeed each other very quickly on the shelves in the stores of Akihabara in Tokyo.