Interlingual Machine Translation

Interlingual machine translation is one of the classic approaches to machine translation. In this approach, the source language, i.e. the text to be translated is transformed into an interlingua, i.e., an abstract language-independent representation. The target language is then generated from the interlingua. Within the rule-based machine translation paradigm, the interlingual approach is an alternative to the direct approach and the transfer approach.

In the direct approach, words are translated directly without passing through an additional representation. In the transfer approach the source language is transformed into an abstract, less language-specific representation. Linguistic rules which are specific to the language pair then transform the source language representation into an abstract target language representation and from this the target sentence is generated.

The interlingual approach to machine translation has advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are that it requires fewer components in order to relate each source language to each target language, it takes fewer components to add a new language, it supports paraphrases of the input in the original language, it allows both the analysers and generators to be written by monolingual system developers, and it handles languages that are very different from each other (e.g. English and Arabic). The obvious disadvantage is that the definition of an interlingua is difficult and maybe even impossible for a wider domain. The ideal context for interlingual machine translation is thus multilingual machine translation in a very specific domain.