The interlingual approach to machine translation has advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are that it requires fewer components in order to relate each source language to each target language, it takes fewer components to add a new language, it supports paraphrases of the input in the original language, it allows both the analysers and generators to be written by monolingual system developers, and it handles languages that are very different from each other (e.g. English and ArabicAbdel Monem, A., Shaalan, K., Rafea, A., Baraka, H., Generating Arabic Text in Multilingual Speech-to-Speech Machine Translation Framework, Machine Translation, Springer, Netherlands, 20(4): 205–258, December 2008.). The obvious disadvantage is that the definition of an interlingua is difficult and maybe even impossible for a wider domain. The ideal context for interlingual machine translation is thus multilingual machine translation in a very specific domain.
