Machine translation, by Thierry Poibeau, is a pocket-sized text. Although not technical, the book provides a good general overview of the subject. Machine translation is a wide and very practical subject so a general text explaining basic concepts and ideas could be quite useful for many people. The book is oriented toward users rather than developers. The target audience is students (undergraduates or even advanced high schoolers) or professionals who use modern computing platforms daily, but never develop machine translation applications or never get too close to the actual machinery of machine translation. Overall, the text is an intelligent, professional, and concise overview of machine translation, which can be useful for disseminating general knowledge of the topic, without any specifics. The book touches on the main aspects of machine translation--from historical perspectives to modern statistical methods of machine translation.

It is important that the book, though not technical, provides a comprehensive overview of the problems that different approaches experience. This is important for the purpose of understanding machine translation’s complexity. The most interesting part of the book is the critical evaluation of real machine translation systems, followed by an analysis of machine translation as a research topic and as a mass-market product.

Overall, the book is easy--even fun--to read and very informative. For example, the book discusses machine translation’s place in a modern information society, that is, how machine translation can help human translators and to what extent it can be used. In the end, I must say that the book is a valuable overview of machine translation.

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