There are obvious reasons for trying to automate the production of multilingual documentation, especially for routine subject-matter in restricted domains (. technical instructions). Two approaches have been adopted: Machine Translation (MT) of a source text, and Multilingual Natural Language Generation (M-NLG) from a knowledge base. For MT, information extraction is a major difficulty, since the meaning must be derived by analysis of the source text; M-NLG avoids this difficulty but seems at first sight to require an expensive phase of knowledge engineering in order to encode the meaning. .
