However, careful translation is often not required for the assimilation of information, such as when, for example, the translation is required for the purpose of internal monitoring and information filtering inside an organization based on a variety of sources. Once all the gathered information has been machine translated, the output is manually sorted and the human translators only post-edit the portion of the output that contains valuable information identified from the raw machine translation output. Translation of the latter kind need not be of publishable quality; it is sufficient that the translation can be understood. In other words, basic comprehension is all that is required as long as the user understands the content or topic of the machine translation output. It is extremely effective for those who need to access foreign language documents, in particular information downloaded from the web. The goal of machine translation for assimilation purposes is to produce large, inexpensive volumes of rough translation automatically at a fast rate. Translation for assimilation purposes is cheaper and quicker by far than for dissemination purposes, most of it achieved by the cheaper PC-based machine translation systems. Keeping translation costs low is the main goal.

In recent years, the demand for the translation of web pages or of communications between two parties from different linguistic backgrounds carried out over the Internet has increased. Human translators are unable to meet this need since instantaneous 'realtime translation' is required to convey the basic contents of the message; the quality of translation is not an issue for this purpose. The exchange of information does not only involve the translation of electronically written texts online but also of bilingual phrases on handheld translation devices for tourists and to some degree, the interpretation of telephone conversations and business negotiations.

Speedy access to information, in whatever language, is important in the modern world, and in this context machine translation can facilitate information search and retrieval. Online multilingual machine translation systems retrieve and extract information from textual and non-textual databases, especially from the Internet, operating in conjunction with other tools to search and retrieve information from scientific and technical journals, to extract specific information from newspaper reports, to summarize reports and to listen to or view non-textual (audio-visual) material.

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