We include here some excerpts from books which are main reference points for researchers.

From this book we particularly recommend chapter 8 on Multilinguality (and the pages by M. Kay, always visionary) and chapter 13 on Evaluation.
This book is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the European Commission. Additional support was provided by the Center for Spoken Language Understanding (Oregon Graduate Institute) and the University of Pisa. Managing Editors are Giovanni Battista Varile and Antonio Zampolli.
Downloadable both as HTML and PostScript.

From this book we recommend chapter 4 on Machine Translation in a broad sense, seen as cooperation between people and machines in the translation task; chapter 5 dedicated to Multilingual Speech Processing; and chapter 7, partly devoted to Speech Translation.
This book is a report commissioned by the US National Science Foundation and also delivered to the European Commission’s Language Engineering Office and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Edited in April 1999. The editors are Eduard Hovy, USC Information Sciences Institute (co-chair); Nancy Ide, Vassar College (co-chair); Robert Frederking, from Carnegie Mellon University; Joseph Mariani, from LIMSI-CNRS; and Antonio Zampolli, from the University of Pisa.
Downloadable in HTML format.

LE Journal has recently been discontinued. The archive is yet accesible at the HLTCentral site.
LE Journal "is focused on the language industry and new technologies; it pays special attention to the world of multilinguism and translation".

This document, commonly known as the the ALPAC report, had a strong impact in the Machine Translation research community during the late sixties (it was written in 1966) till the eighties. Particularly, it had a strong impact on public funding for this research area. In short, it regarded MT as an excessively complex task for current technology. It may contain relevant lessons even now, 30 years later.
Reference: Language and Machines: Computers in Translation and Linguistics Report by the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC), Division of Behavioral Sciences, National Research Council. Washington, D.C., 1966: National Academy of Sciences.

John Hutchins is one of the most relevant figures in MT research. His website contains up-to-date downloadable versions of nearly all his publications, including the whole of his book on the history of machine translation.