[1] Also in 1960, he founded the Centre d'Étude pour la Traduction Automatique (CETA), later renamed as Groupe d'Étude pour la Traduction Automatique (GETA) and currently known as GETALP,[2] a team at the Laboratoire d'informatique de Grenoble, and soon showed his gift for rapid understanding, synthesis, and innovation, and his taste for personal communication across linguistic borders and barriers.
After visiting a number of centers, mainly in the United States, where machine translation research was conducted, he analyzed the shortcomings of the "first-generation" approach and evaluated the potential of a new generation based on grammar and formal language theory, and proposed a new approach based on a representational "pivot" and the use of (declarative) rule systems that transform a sequential sentence from one level of representation to another.
At the end of this period, the accumulated experience led him to correct some defects of the "pure" declarative and interlingual approach, and to use heuristic programming methods, implemented with procedural grammars written in LSPLs ("specialized languages for linguistic programming", langages spécialisés pour la programmation linguistique) that were developed under his direction, and integrated into the ARIANE-78 machine translation system.
This idea, premonitory of later theoretical work (Ray Jackendoff, Gerald Gazdar) is still the cornerstone of all machine translation software built by GETA and the French national TA project.
[1] From France, he often collaborated with other countries (notably Canada, the United States, the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Japan, China, Brazil, Malaysia, and Thailand), working on the specification and implementation of grammars and dictionaries.
He began cooperating with Malaysia, for example, in 1979, which led to the creation of the Automatic Terjemaan Project, with a first prototype of an English-Malay MT system demonstrated in 1980.