the dictionary. By examining the contents of this store before embarking on the translation, a user may hope to get a preview of the difficulties ahead and to make some decisions in advance about how to treat them. These decisions, of course, will be recorded in the store itself. In the course of doing this or, indeed, for any reason whatever, the translator can call for a display of all the units in the text that contain a certain word, phrase, string of characters, or whatever. After all, the most important reference to have when translating a text is the text itself. If the piece of text to be translated next is anything but entirely straightforward, the translator might start by issuing a command causing the system to display anything in the store that might be relevant to it. This will bring to his attention decisions he made before the actual translation started, statistically significant words and phrases, and a record of anything that had attracted attention when it occurred before. Before going on, he can examine past and future fragments of text that contain similar material." 1.3 Expectation of the better performance of the translator's amanuensis At the end of the paper, Kay mentioned some reasons to expect better performance of this device. First, the system is in a position to draw its human collaborator's attention to the matters most likely to need it, second, the decisions that have to be made in the course of translating a passage are rarely independent, third, one of the most important facilities in the system is the one that keeps track of words and phrases that are used in some special way in the current text. «A Life in Language». A speech given in acknowledgement of the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 27 June 2005. http://www.stanford.edu/~mjkay/LifeOfLanguage.pdf String Alignment Using Suffix Trees. A paper about the possible use of suffix trees for aligning texts and their translations. http://www.stanford.edu/~mjkay/CYCLING.pdf Some unfinished musings on the nature of translation. Here are some unfinished musings on the nature of translation. http://www.stanford.edu/~mjkay/CurrentState.pdf Some half-baked thoughts on language models in statistical NLP on which I need some help. http://www.stanford.edu/~mjkay/language_models.pdf His 1994 paper on "Regular Models of Phonological Rule Systems". Computational Linguistics 20(3):331–378" with Ronald Kaplan. http://www.stanford.edu/~mjkay/Kaplan%26Kay.pdf Books Linguistics and Information Science (with Karen Spärck Jones), Academic Press,