OS enthusiasts should note the

workshop on Open Source translation technologies at the MT summit to be held this summer in Phuket, Thailand:

Open-source software is associated to a change in the business model. In the case of machine translation, it would result in a shift from license-based or charge-per-word models to a service model in which enterprises would offer users a variety of services: consulting, customization, linguistic data development, integration in multilingual document management systems, etc.

Machine translation is only one of the available language technologies which can be applied to translation; the effect of the existence of open-source software for other translation applications such as translation memory, etc., or even other natural language processing applications not related to translation, would therefore be worth examining as well.