(IAMTC's) Thesis

Superficiality constrains

MT systems that use only superficial representations, including the current generation of statistical MT systems, have been successful and useful. However, they will experience a plateau in quality, much like other "silver bullet" approaches to MT. Reeder 2004, p. 1

So, MT needs deep representations

One promising type: interlinguas

An interlingua is a semantic representation which mediates between source and target languages in interlingua-based machine translation. Reeder 2004, p. 1

The aim of an interlingua is to capture language-independent semantic expressions. Reeder 2004, p. 1