CrossLanguage, possibly the only company in the world dedicated to providing machine translation implementation services (as opposed to actually offering MT technology), has issued its first newsletter (sign on at the site). In it, Jaap van der Meer introduces the concept of transformer companies:

In the transformer age, customers will need translation at an ever faster rate, sometimes even in real-time. Volumes keep growing, yet there is still tremendous pressure on costs. The old subjectivity that underlies quality evaluation is rapidly disappearing. Translation quality will be measured more easily using standard metrics. The emphasis, meanwhile, will focus on accuracy, utility, and consistency, rather than ‘style’. Finally, an industry that has been inspired over the years by a global projection model, in which English content is translated into forty or more languages, needs to transform itself, and suddenly learn to supply the same language pairs – but in reverse order.