- Pivot language
A
pivot language, sometimes also called a bridge language is an artificial ornatural language used as an intermediary language for translation. Using a pivot language avoids the combinatorial explosion of having translators across every combination of the supported languages.The disadvantage of a pivot language is that each step of retranslation introduces possible mistakes and ambiguities. For example, when
Hernán Cortés communicated withMesoamerican Indians, he would talk Spanish toGerónimo de Aguilar who would talk Mayan toMalintzin who would talk Nahuatl to the locals.English, French, Russian and Arabic are often used as pivot languages.
Interlingua has been used as a pivot language in international conferences and has been proposed as a pivot language for theEuropean Union . [Breinstrup, Thomas. "Linguaphobos? Non in le UE". [Linguaphobes? Not in the EU] . "Panorama in Interlingua ", 2006, Issue 5.]Esperanto was proposed as a pivot language in theDistributed Language Translation project and has been used in this way in the Majstro Tradukvortaro at the Esperanto website [http://www.majstro.com/ Majstro.com] . TheUniversal Networking Language is an artificial language specifically designed for use as a pivot language.Pivot coding is also a common method of translating data for computer systems. For example, the
internet protocol ,XML andhigh level language s are pivot codings of compuer data which are then often rendered into internal binary formats for particular computer systems.References
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