interlingua (n.)

A term used in machine translation for a proposed intermediate REPRESENTATION constructed to facilitate the automatic translation of one language into another. In an interlingual approach, the source language is given a highly abstract representation which captures all the SYNTACTIC and SEMANTIC information necessary for translation into several target languages. The interlingua would usually be a specially constructed FORMAL language, but other ARTIFICIAL LANGUAGES have been proposed (such as Esperanto), and in theory a natural language could also be used. The difficulty of developing a model of syntactic or semantic UNIVERSALS has limited the applicability of this approach.