Machine Translation Today and Tomorrow  

The field of machine translation (MT) was the pioneer research area in computational linguistics during the 1950s and 1960s. When it began, the assumed goal was the automatic translation of all kinds of documents at a quality equalling that of the best human translators. It became apparent very soon that this goal was impossible in the foreseeable future.

Hutchins, W. John. Gardez Vlg (2002). Articles>Language>History>Machine Translation