Three basic types of MT systems: direct systems, transfer systems and interlinguas.

There are broadly three basic MT strategies. The earliest historically is the 'direct
approach', adopted by most MT systems of what has come to be known as the first
generation of MT systems. In response to the apparent failure of this strategy, two
types of 'indirect approach' were developed: the 'transfer method', and the use of
an 'interlingua'. Systems of this nature are sometimes referred to as second
generation systems.
The direct method
The first (and historically oldest) type is generally referred to as the 'direct
translation' approach: the MT system is designed specifically for one particular pair
of languages, e.g. Russian as the language of the original texts, the source
language, and English as the language of the translated texts, the target language.
The direct approach lacks any kinds of intermediate stages in translation processes:
the processing of the source language input text leads 'directly' to the target language
output text.
First generation direct MT systems began with a morphological analysis phase. In
this phase the system identified word endings and reduced inflected forms to their
uninflected basic forms. Then it input the results into a large bilingual dictionary look-
up program.
In other words, when the system would find the canonical form of a word, it would
look up in the bilingual dictionary to find an equivalent in the target language. There
would follow some local reordering rules to give more acceptable target language
output, and then the target language text would be produced.

The indirect method

The second basic design strategy is the interlingua approach, which assumes that
it is possible to convert SL texts into representations common to more than one
language.
The source text is analysed in a representation from which the target text is directly
generated. The intermediate representation includes all information necessary for the
generation of the target text without 'looking back' to the original text. This is an
abstract representation of the target text as well as a representation of the source
text. It is neutral between two or more languages.
From such interlingual representations texts are generated into other languages.
Translation is generated in two stages: from SL to the interlingua (IL) and from the IL
to the TL. Procedures for SL analysis are intended to be SL-specific and not oriented
to any particular TL; likewise programs for TL synthesis are TL-specific and not
designed for input from particular SLs.
A common argument for the interlingua approach is economy of effort in a
multilingual environment. Translation from and into n languages requires n(n-1)
bilingual 'direct translation' systems; but with translation via an interlingua just 2n
interlingual programs are needed.
With more than three languages the interlingua approach is claimed to be more
economic.
On the other hand, the complexity of the interlingua itself is greatly increased.
Interlinguas may be based on an artificial language, an auxiliary language such as
Esperanto, a set of semantic primitives presumed common to many or all languages,
or a 'universal' language-independent vocabulary.
Target languages have no effect on any processes of analysis; the aim of analysis
is the derivation of an 'interlingual' representation. The advantage is that to add a
new language to the system one needs to create just two new modules: an analysis
grammar and a generation grammar. The main disadvantage of the interlingual
approach is the difficulty of creating an interlingua, even for closely related languages
(e.g. the Romance languages: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese).
The third basic strategy is the less ambitious transfer approach.
The term transfer method applies to those which have bilingual modules between
intermediate representations of each of the two languages.
These representations are language-dependent: the result of analysis is an abstract
representation of the source text (this could be something like a phrase-structure
tree). In turn, the input to generation is an abstract representation of the target text
(again, possibly a tree).
The function of the bilingual transfer modules is to convert source language
(intermediate) representations into target language (intermediate) representations, as
shown in the figure.
In comparison with the interlingua type of multilingual system there are clear
disadvantages in the transfer approach. The addition of a new language involves not
only the two modules for analysis and generation, but also the addition of new
transfer modules, the number of which may vary according to the number of
languages in the existing system. For example, in the case of a two-language
system, a third language would require four new transfer modules (see the figure to
the right).

Why then is the transfer approach so often preferred to the interlingua method?
The first reason is that it is far too difficult to devise language-independent
representations (interlingua).
The second is that in the transfer approach the analysis and generation grammars
work between two languages and are not so difficult to write. In contrast to that in the
interlingua approach these grammars are language-independent and must work for
any language of the system.
The differences between direct and indirect, transfer and interlingua, rule-based,
knowledge-based and corpus-based are becoming less useful for the categorization
of systems.
Transfer systems consist typically of three types of dictionaries (SL dictionaries
containing detailed morphological, grammatical and semantic information, similar TL
dictionaries, and a bilingual dictionary relating base SL forms and base TL forms)
and various grammars (for SL analysis, TL synthesis and for transformation of SL
structures into TL forms).
levels of linguistic description: morphology, syntax, semantics.
Hence, analysis may be divided into morphological analysis (identification of word
endings, word compounds), syntactic analysis (identification of phrase structures,
dependency, subordination, etc.), semantic analysis (resolution of lexical and
structural ambiguities); synthesis may likewise pass through
- semantic synthesis (selection of appropriate compatible lexical and structural
forms),
- syntactic synthesis (generation of required phrase and sentence structures), and
- morphological synthesis (generation of correct word forms).
In transfer systems, the transfer component may also have separate programs
dealing with lexical transfer (selection of vocabulary equivalents) and with structural
transfer (transformation into TL appropriate structures). In some earlier forms of
transfer systems analysis did not involve a semantic stage, transfer was restricted to
the conversion of syntactic structures, i.e. syntactic transfer alone.
The direct translation approach was typical of the "first generation" of MT systems.
The indirect approach of interlingua and transfer based systems is often seen to
characterise the "second generation" of MT system types. Both are based
essentially on the specification of rules (for morphology, syntax, lexical selection,
semantic analysis, and generation). Most recently, corpus-based methods have
changed the traditional picture (see below). During the last five years, there is
beginning to emerge a "third generation" of hybrid systems combining the rule-
based approaches of the earlier types and the more recent corpus-based methods.