Capturing Language-Specific Semantic Distinctions in Interlingua-Based MT

We describe an interlingua-based approach to machine translation, in which a DRS representation of the source text is used as the interlingua representation. A target DRS is then created and used to construct the target text. We describe several advantages of this level of representation. We also argue that problems of translation mismatch and divergence should properly bo viewed not as translation problems per se but rather as generation problems, although the source text can be used to guide the target generator. The system we have built relics exclusively on monolingual linguistic descriptions that are also, for the most part, bidirectional.