  The main aim of translation is an accurate transfer of meaning so that the
result is not only grammatically and lexically correct but also communicatively
adequate. This paper stresses the need for discourse analysis the aim of which
is to preserve the communicative meaning in English--Polish machine
translation. Unlike English, which is a positional language with word order
grammatically determined, Polish displays a strong tendency to order
constituents according to their degree of salience, so that the most
informationally salient elements are placed towards the end of the clause
regardless of their grammatical function. The Centering Theory developed for
tracking down given information units in English and the Theory of Functional
Sentence Perspective predicting informativeness of subsequent constituents
provide theoretical background for this work. The notion of {\em center} is
extended to accommodate not only for pronominalisation and exact reiteration
but also for definiteness and other center pointing constructs. Center
information is additionally graded and applicable to all primary constituents
in a given utterance. This information is used to order the post-transfer
constituents correctly, relying on statistical regularities and some syntactic
clues.

Computation and Language;Computation and Language