In the world of the 1990s, linguistic and traditional discipline boundaries are breaking down. Consequently, many companies and organisations are faced with considerable communication problems, including a growing need for translation. It has recently been estimated, for instance, that the number of pages translated in Western Europe in 1986 was 100 million; by 1987 this was said to have increased to 160 million. A number of factors have contributed to this growth in demand. Product cycles are shorter, requiring more frequent updating of documentation; documentation has become more complex, concomitant with the increasing complexity of technology; companies have begun to realise that multilingual markets are generally bigger than monolingual ones; and large companies arethemselves often transnational.