Translation Challenges and Universal Networking Language

This paper presents challenges being faced in designing automatic translation software. There are many approaches to automatic translation like Direct, Rule based, Transfer based, Statistical based and Interlingua. A brief description of all the approaches and their advantages and drawbacks are discussed. Universal Networking Language (UNL) based on Interlingua approach can be used especially for translation among multiple languages because it requires knowledge of UNL and of the language which user wants UNL to support. User can then get translated text in any of the languages supported by UNL without even being oblivious to any other language. It is less expensive approach also. This paper also gives brief introduction to UNL and how it can overcome many of the challenges in translation.