mt special issue on slt : reminder reminder - - deadline is july 1 1998 call for submissions machine translation special issue on spoken language translation guest editor : steven krauwer ( utrecht university ) guest editorial board : doug arnold ( university of essex ) pascale fung ( hkust , hong kong ) walter kasper ( dfki , saarbrucken ) alon lavie ( cmu , pittsburgh ) lori levin ( cmu , pittsburgh ) hermann ney ( rwth , aachen ) harold somers ( umist , manchester ) some 15 years ago , when machine translation had become fashionable again in europe , few people would be prepared to consider seriously embarking upon spoken language translation research . after all , where both machine translation of written text , and speech understanding and production ( despite important achievements ) were still quite far from showing robustness in domain-independent applications , it seemed clear that putting three not even halfway understood technologies together would be premature , and bound to fail . since then , the world has changed . many researchers , both in academia and in industry , have taken up the challenge to build systems capable of translating spoken language . does that mean that most of the problems involved in speech-to - text , text-to - text translation , and text-to - speech have been solved ? the answer is no : although we have made a tremendous progress , both from a scientific and from a technological point of view , many of the fundamental problems in mt and in speech understanding remain unsolved . yet a certain degree of optimism is justified here . first of all , it is clear that on the whole general expectations of what mt will do are changing . where in the past the ultimate goal of mt seemed to be to provide a perfect , but cheaper and faster alternative to the human translator , there is now a clear shift from the ideal of fully automated high quality translation of unrestricted texts to the more practical problem of overcoming the language barriers we encounter in various situations . this shift of focus allows us to partition the problem we address into a series of smaller ones , the solution to which may be within our reach . this applies both to spoken and written language translation . if we look at spoken communication between human beings with different native languages , very often the main success criterion for this communication is not whether or not the individual utterances produced by the participants have been expressed or understood without errors ( which will rarely be the case ) , but rather whether the intended goal of the communication has been attained ( hotel room reservation , airline information , etc ) . this observation is extremely important when we try to set our goals for spoken translation systems . once we have realized that communication takes place in a specific context , with a specific goal , and have accepted that sentence-by - sentence linguistically correct translation is not a necessary condition for successful multilingual communication , we can start exploiting the full potential of spoken dialogues in human-human and human-machine interaction : the basic structure of dialogues , the ways to control dialogue flow , the possibility for repair . a workshop dedicated to spoken language translation , organized in conjunction with eacl / acl 1997 in madrid , showed that there was a keen interest in the topic , and that many acedemic and industrial research teams have interesting results to report . therefore we feel that the time has come to dedicate a special issue of the journal machine translation to this topic , and we are inviting high-quality , previously unpublished research papers addressing problems in the whole field of spoken language translation . ( note : authors who had papers accepted for the madrid workshop are especially encouraged to submit papers which have developed out of their workshop contributions , though they should note that we do not intend simply to reprint the workshop papers in their original form . ) we are especially interested in papers addressing problems or solutions that are typical for spoken language translation ( as opposed to written language translation ) . format for submission : please consult the journal 's web pages : home page : http : / / kapis . www . wkap . nl / journalhome . htm / 0922-6567 instructions for authors : http : / / kapis . www . wkap . nl / kaphtml . htm / ifa0922-6567 latex style files : http : / / kapis . www . wkap . nl / jrnlstyle . htm / 0922-6567 articles should be submitted directly to the publishers , either by e-mail to ellen . klink @ wkap . nl , with the subject header " submission to coat speech special issue " , or in hard-copy to either of the following addresses : machine translation editorial office , machine translation editorial office kluwer academic publishers kluwer academic publishers p . o . box 990 , p . o . box 230 3300 az dordrecht , accord , ma 02018-023 the netherlands u . s . a . the journal is typeset using latex , so the preferred medium for submission of articles in electronic format is latex source ( using the kluwer style file ) or gzipped postscript . if submitting hard-copy , four copies of the paper are required . the length of the papers should be approximately 10-20 pages if using the kluwer style file ( around 20k words ) . authors are requested to send a copy of an abstract of not more than 200 words to the guest editor steven . krauwer @ let . ruu . nl or in hard-copy to steven krauwer , utrecht institute of linguistics ots , trans 10 , 3512 jk utrecht , the netherlands submission deadline : submissions and abstracts should be received by july 1 1998 . papers will be reviewed by at least three members of the editorial board . we are aiming for publication as issue 3 or 4 of volume 13 ( autumn or winter , 1998 ) .