Machine translation (MT) is one of the major research fields of natural language processing (NLP), and it always spearheadsthe research frontier in NLP. In this paper, after a systematic survey of the development history of MT from a macroscopic perspective,with particular emphasis on the main development path of underlying methodologies and core technologies in MT, we drew a general picture of the milestones that marked the key points of a long journey for both theoretical study and practical accomplishment for the past seven decades. The latest fruitful development achieved in the area of MT application shows that, the paradigm shift from the traditional linguistic rule-based approaches to the so-called empirical approach, based on increasingly available amounts of “raw data” in the form of massive collections of texts and their translations, compounded by the phenomenal advancement of computer technology, will become the driving force that will potentially lead to the breakthrough in MT. Based on the above observation and analysis, some suggestions on the short-term development strategy for machine translation as well as natural language processing in China are proposed.