Interlingua

In machine translation, a language-neutral semantic representation that serves as an intermediate form between the source and target languages. An interlingual MT system first analyses the source text into this representation and then generates the target text from it, so the same interlingua can in principle support any language pair. Interlinguas demand deep semantic analysis and broad world knowledge and are usually practical only within narrow domains. For accessibility work — particularly sign-language translation — an interlingua is often needed because spoken-to-signed translation involves modality differences (spatial grammar, classifier predicates) that cannot be captured by word- or syntax-level transfer.