ABSTRACT
The Netherlands and Belgium share a history in translation technology research and an interest in Dutch, the language spoken by most of the inhabitants of the Netherlands and by about 60 percent of Belgium’s population, mostly concentrated in the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders. Translation technology research and development came, went, and came back again in a span of three decades. Early Dutch and Belgian computational linguistics research was boosted significantly by roles that researchers and teams took in national and international knowledge-based machine translation system development programmes in the 1980s. Industrial spin-offs were created, remainders of which can still be found in present-day industrial translation technology providers. Currently, research follows the typical trends in translation technologies: statistical machine translation and hybridizations with linguistic knowledge, and business-oriented translation process automation.
