That was a difficult and tedious job, because of the specificities of the English and French sublanguages used, and not very rewarding, as the lifetime of a bulletin is only 4 hours.
A prototype was ready after a few months, with basic integration in the workflow of translation (source and target bulletins travelled over telex lines at the time and MT happened on a mainframe computer).
The quality, measured as the percentage of edit operations (inserting or deleting a word counts as 1, replacing as 2) on the MT results, reached 85% in 1985.
The Q-systems formalism is a rule-based SLLP (Specialized Language for Linguistic Programming) invented by Alain Colmerauer in 1967 as he was a postdoc coopérant at the TAUM group.
As the engine of the Q-systems is highly non-deterministic, and the manipulated data structures are in some ways too simple, without any types such as string or number, Chandioux encountered limitations in his efforts to raise translation quality and lower computation time to the point he could run it on microcomputers.
In 1981, Chandioux created a new SLLP, or metalanguage for linguistic applications, based on the same basic algorithmic ideas as the Q-systems, but more deterministic, and offering typed labels on tree nodes.