In Bill Bryson's book "Mother Tongue" he devotes a few paragraphs to Esperanto and refers to a project that was trying to use the language as an aid to computerized translation. The idea was that the page to be translated would first be translated into Esperanto, thus stripping out the idioms etc that computers find so troublesome, and then from Esperanto into the target language. Does anyone know if this was ever successfully done?

I think this refers to Distributed Language Translation (DLT), a research project part-funded by the EEC in the late '80s. The idea was that if you use a single language as a pivot language for translations (ie, translating to the pivot language before making the final translation) then you would greatly reduce the complexity of the translation program needed.

For example: if you want your program to be able to translate in any direction between 20 different languages, then it needs 20 x 19 = 380 translation modules; adding a single language to that would require adding another 40 modules, with that number increasing with each subsequent language. But using an intermediate pivot language, you only need 40 - 20 to the pivot and 20 from the pivot - and new languages only require 2 extra modules each to be added. Since Esperanto is relatively low on irregularities, idioms, synonyms etc the idea was that it would be ideal as the intermediate language. In the end the project wasn't realised as a commercial product, but a similar idea is used by some modern-day programs like the Ergane dictionary.

I must remember to add The Mother Tongue to my "to read" list; if you've finished reading it then I recommend Bryson's Made In America, it's a great one for dipping into at random.

Thanks for that. I recommend "Mother Tongue", but I'm a big fan of Bryson's. "Made in America" is excellent. Have you tried "A walk in the Woods"? That's a real hoot.