The city of Barcelona has traditionally played a leading role in Spain’s research activities in the field of automatic translation. Back in 1983, when the European Community embarked upon the Eurotra project, Spain hardly had any specialists in computational linguistics at all, and a workgroup including grammarians, lexographers and translators was set up at the Boschai Gimpera Foundation, attached to the University of Barcelona. Another centre was established later at the Autonomous University of Madrid, principally specialising in morphology. In 1992 the European Community decided that Eurotra should be reoriented towards industry in order to generate marketable products, such as dictionaries, style and grammar checkers, plagiarism detectors and assisted translation. These are the aims of the ALEP project currently in progress, in which the University of Barcelona is playing an active part. The university is also currently involved in three further projects: the Trade project, which runs to June 1995, together with Centro de Calculo de Sabadell, the objective of which is to design an automatic translation operating system based on the resources and technology developed by the Eurotra programme; the Eurolang project, led by SITE and Siemens Nixdorf SA and due to end in June 1994, which aims to produce a collection of tools for processing natural language, including an automatic translation system and various products to aid the translator; and finally the Multext project, which runs to February 1995, in conjunction with the Autonomous University of Barcelona, which seeks to establish software standards for corpus-based automatic translation.
