# Pivot language > Mediated Wiki article. Canonical URL: https://mediated.wiki/source/Pivot_language > Markdown URL: https://mediated.wiki/source/Pivot_language.md > Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_language > Source revision: 1218909668 > License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) {{Short description|Intermediary language between different languages}} {{refimprove|date=July 2018}} A '''pivot language''', sometimes also called a '''bridge language''', is an [artificial](/source/artificial_language) or [natural language](/source/natural_language) used as an intermediary language for translation between many different languages – to translate between any pair of languages A and B, one translates A to the pivot language P, then from P to B. Using a pivot language avoids the [combinatorial explosion](/source/combinatorial_explosion_(communication)) of having translators across every combination of the supported languages, as the number of combinations of language is linear (n-1), rather than quadratic \left(\textstyle{\binom{n}{2}}=\frac{n^2-n}{2}\right) – one need only know the language A and the pivot language P (and someone else the language B and the pivot P), rather than needing a different translator for every possible combination of A and B. The disadvantage of a pivot language is that each step of retranslation introduces possible mistakes and ambiguities – using a pivot language involves two steps, rather than one. For example, when [Hernán Cortés](/source/Hern%C3%A1n_Cort%C3%A9s) communicated with [Mesoamerican](/source/Mesoamerican) Indians, he spoke Spanish to [Gerónimo de Aguilar](/source/Ger%C3%B3nimo_de_Aguilar), who spoke [Mayan](/source/Mayan_language) to [Malintzin](/source/Malintzin), who spoke [Nahuatl](/source/Nahuatl_language) to the locals. == Examples == {{See also|Interlingual machine translation}} [English](/source/English_language), [French](/source/French_language), [Russian](/source/Russian_language), and [Arabic](/source/Arabic_language) are often used as pivot languages. [Interlingua](/source/Interlingua) has been used as a pivot language in international conferences and has been proposed as a pivot language for the [European Union](/source/European_Union).Breinstrup, Thomas. "Linguaphobos? Non in le UE". [Linguaphobes? Not in the EU]. ''[Panorama in Interlingua](/source/Panorama_in_Interlingua)'', 2006, Issue 5. [Esperanto](/source/Esperanto) was proposed as a pivot language in the [Distributed Language Translation](/source/Distributed_Language_Translation) project and has been used in this way in the Majstro Tradukvortaro at the Esperanto website [http://www.majstro.com/ Majstro.com]. The [Universal Networking Language](/source/Universal_Networking_Language) is an artificial language specifically designed for use as a pivot language. == In computing == {{see also|Intermediate language|Data conversion#Pivotal conversion}} Pivot coding is also a common method of translating data for computer systems. For example, the [Internet Protocol](/source/Internet_Protocol), [XML](/source/XML) and [high level language](/source/high_level_language)s are pivot codings of computer data which are then often rendered into internal binary formats for particular computer systems. [Unicode](/source/Unicode) was designed to be usable as a pivot coding between various major existing character encodings, though its widespread adoption as a coding in its own right has made this usage unimportant. ==References== {{Reflist}} * Hua Wu and Haifeng Wang. 2009. [http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P09-1018 Revisiting Pivot Language Approach for Machine Translation]. ACL-09. * Utiyama, M. & H. Isahara (2006) [http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/N07-1061 A comparison of pivot methods for phrase-based statistical machine translation]. In Proceedings of NAACL/HLT, 484{491. {{DEFAULTSORT:Pivot Language}} Category:Translation Category:Constructed languages Category:Language --- Adapted from the Wikipedia article [Pivot language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_language) by Wikipedia contributors ([contributor history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_language?action=history)). Available under [Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Changes may have been made.