The machine translation system SYSTRAN was assessed for translation quality and system productivity. The test was carried out on translations from English to French dealing with food science and technology. Machine translations were compared to manual translations of the same texts. SYSTRAN was found to be a useful system of information processing, but resulting translations still required much human revision. An assessment of machine translation quality put average intelligibility at 78%. It was found that, while fewer than 5% of the words in the manual translations required revision, over one-quarter of all words in the machine translations had to be corrected. The methodology and results of the evaluation are described in detail, with much data presented in tabular form. (JB)