The recent work of the Unit has been primarily concerned with the employment of thesauri in machine translation. Limited success has been achieved, in punchedcard tests, in improving the idiomatic quality and so the intelligibility of an initially unsatisfactory translation, by word-for-word procedures, from Italian into English, by using a program which permitted selection of final equivalents from "heads" in Roget's Thesaurus, . lists of synonyms, near-synonyms and associated words and phrases, instead of from previously determined lists of alternative translations
