Challenges in Adapting an Interlingua for Bidirectional English-Italian Translation

We describe our experience in adapting an existing highquality, interlingual, unidirectional machine translation system to a new domain and bidirectional translation for a new language pair (English and Italian). We focus on the interlingua design changes which were necessary to achieve high quality output in view of the language mismatches between English and Italian. The representation we propose contains features that are interpreted di erently, depending on the translation direction. This decision simpli ed the process of creating the interlingua for individual sentences, and allows the system to defer mapping of language-speci c features (such as tense and aspect), which are realized when the target syntactic feature structure is created. We also describe a set of problems we encountered in translating modal verbs, and discuss the representation of modality in our interlingua.