Distributed Language Translation

Distributed Language Translation was a project to develop an interlingual machine translation system for twelve European languages. It ran between 1985 and 1990.
DLT was undertaken by the Dutch software house BSO in Utrecht in cooperation with the now defunct Dutch airplane manufacturer Fokker and the Universal Esperanto Association.
A prototype application of DLT in technical translation achieved an accuracy rate of around 95 percent. Not only the specific technical vocabulary was checked, but also narrow and broad contexts. For more general texts, the accuracy of the translation was around 50 to 60 percent. BSO failed to attract investment for a further development phase after 1990, and DLT was abandoned unfinished. However, the value of this research project, which according to external experts was very promising, remains in the form of published articles and a whole series of books, detailed and comprehensive enough to support future developments, as if according to the concept of "open source".