The city of Barcelona has traditionally played a leading role in Spain’s research activities in automatic language translation. In 1983, when the European Community embarked upon the Eurotra project, Spain hardly had any specialists in computational linguistics, and a workgroup including grammarians, lexographers and translators was set up at the Bosch i Gimpera Foundation, attached to the University of Barcelona. Another centre was established later at the Autonomous University of Madrid, specialising mainly in morphology. In 1992 the European Commission decided Eurotra should be reorientated towards industry to generate marketable products, such as dictionaries, style and grammar checkers, plagiarism detectors and computer-assisted translation. These are the aims of the ALEP project currently under way, in which the University of Barcelona is playing an active part. The university is also currently involved in three further projects; the Trade project, to be concluded in June 1995, together with Centro de Calculo de Sabadell SA, to design an automatic translation operating system based on resources and technology developed by the Eurotra programme; the Eurolang project, led by SITE and Siemens-Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG and due to be completed 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 translation, and finally the Multext project, by February 1995, in conjunction with the Autonomous University of Barcelona, which seeks to establish software standards for automatic translation.
