there are two related arguments against the plausibility of machine translation as an industrial enterprise from the point of view of linguistics and computer science. Two arguments are commonly made for ad hoc solutions to the problems of machine translation. In the former argument, "Ad hoc solutions tend to be based on case-by-case analyses of what linguists call surface phenomena, essentially strings of words, and on real or imagined statistical properties of particular styles of writing and domains of discourse." It is a simple statistical claim that can be dismissed. In the second argument, ad hoc solutions is only alluded to the understanding of the second language by reading text, and was called sorcerer's apprentice, because "this kind of argument is to the effect that the kind of incomplete theory that linguists and computer scientists have been able to provide is often a worse base on which to build practical devices than no theory at all because the theory does not know when to stop." "The main problem with the sorcerer's-apprentice argument is that the decision that a sentence could be translated without analysis can only be made after the fact. Example sentence shows that there is more than one interpretation of a sentence at some level and further analysis shows that there is a single translation that is compatible with each of them. In short, the algorithm required to decide when analysis is required would have to use the results of the very analysis it is designed to avoid." 1.2 The Translator's Amanuensis and translation memory This is the main part of the paper, for illustrate what is translator's amanuensis, the author showed three aspects: text editing, translation aids, and machine translation. "Suppose that the translators are provided with a terminal consisting of a keyboard, a screen, and some way of pointing at individual words and letters. The display on the screen is divided into two windows. The text to be translated appears in the upper window and the translation will be composed in the bottom one." It is the form of the translator's amanuensis which is not a real device and never will. "Both windows behave in the same way. Using the pointing device, the translator can select a letter, word, sentence, line, or paragraph and, by pressing the appropriate key, cause some operation to be visited upon it." These two figures show the translation process from the