Interlingual Machine Translation

The first part of this paper considers some of the reasons why mechanical translation via a logically formalized interlingua is worth pursuing. The interlingua described consists of a network of bonded semantic elements, the bonds being either homogeneous, corresponding to a generalized notion of qualification, or heterogeneous, for dyadic relations. The translation procedure involves a basic program applicable to any input language (P) and any output language (Q), and P-interlingua and interlingua-Q mechanical dictionaries. The essence of the program is the construction of an array of symbols, grammatical, syntactic and semantic, containing all the information required for translation. The interlingual translation of the input in P is then derived by successive eliminations, usually involving comparisons either across the rows of the array or down the columns. Similar treatment of a second array suffices to translate from the interlingua to the output Q.