This is paper is a survey of the current machine translation research in the US, Europe, and Japan. A short history of machine translation is presented first, followed by an overview of the current research work. Representative examples of a wide range of different approaches adopted by machine translation researchers are presented. These are described in detail along with a discussion of the practicalities of scaling up these approaches for operational environments. In support of this discussion, issues in, and techniques for, evaluating machine translation systems are discussed. Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-98-72)