Interlingua
According to Collins dictionary Interlingua is an artificial language based on words common to English and the Romance languages. Interlingua is any artificial language used to represent the meaning of natural languages, as for purposes of machine translation. Interlingua is an intermediate form between two or more languages.
Interlingual Machine Translation
Interlingual Machine Translation is a methodology that employs interlingua for translation. Ideally the interlingual representation of the text should be sufficient to generate sentences in any language. Languages can have different parts of speech. In some cases two or more words in one language have a equivalent single word in another language. Interlingua approach addresses these structural differences between languages. The disadvantage is that the design of interlingua is too complex. This is due to the fact that there is no clear methodology developed so far to build a perfect interlingual representation.
An interlingual lexicon is necessary to store information about the nature and behavior of each word in the language. The information include events and actions.
Figure: Interlingual Machine Translation
A typical interlingual MT system has analyzer and synthesizer for each language. The analyzer produces interlingual represention of the meaning of the given text. The synthesizer produces one or more sentences with the meaning given by the analyzer. KANT is a interlingual machine translation system openational in a commercial setting.