I came across this very interesting article on
http://www.translationdirectory.com:
Translation Technology Failures and Future.
The article is dated in 2003, but the main concepts and ideas seem to me to be completely valid today (March 2006). I found specially interesting the "Redundancy and Translation Memory" paragraph giving many hints on why a decent Automatic Translation software will be very difficult to create if not impossible.
The article is signed by Timothy R. Hunt.