In the inquiry semantics approach, described in Section 2.2.2, the grammar network is traversed and features are selected from the systems of the language. At each choice point, the generation component raises an inquiry, and obtains a response which enables it to decide which feature to select. This approach seems to be particularly suitable for target text generation in export translation. The inquiries come from inside the generation component, and are a method for consulting other components of the complete system. In an export translation system, the other components should include a source text analysis component and a human user interface component.
To use this approach in machine translation, the purpose of the analysis of the source text would be to enable preselections to be made in the target language grammar network traversal. This depends on being able to establish correspondences between the results of the analysis and the target functional systems, which would be easier if the analysis was itself functional. An approach to the future development of functional SFG-based analysis is briefly discussed in Section 10.2.3. However, even a formal or semantic analysis could be used to make some preselections. Other functional choices in the target language would still be made by user interaction, including those where the necessary information is not in the source text at all.