The commission uses a programme called Systran, which it has adapted to translate various combinations of English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and Greek.

ECONOMIST: Europe��s languages

The biggest difference, says Dimitrios Sabatakakis, chief executive of Systran, is that the Internet makes it much easier to create a customised version of a machine-translation system.

ECONOMIST: Machine translation

So, Autodesk opted for a customised Systran system which translates search results into French, Spanish, German or Italian. (Support for Japanese is in the works.) By analysing the documents in Autodesk's database, and exploiting the fact that they are written in a consistent style, it was possible to tune the translation system to produce far more accurate results.

ECONOMIST: Machine translation