Esperanto as an intermediate language for machine translation

According to an unconfirmed rumour, on the occasion of a prestigious machine translation conference held in Japan in 1989, a senior representative of a major Japanese computer manufacturer reported that his company had sold X number of machine translation systems and he proudly added that 10 per cent are actually used. This cannot make sense unless 90 per cent of the customers buy machine-translation systems like Van Gogh paintings: for prestige.