Bridging

Two-step translation through an intermediate language

Bridging is a machine translation method that uses an intermediate language to translate between source and target languages. If a language pair (source, target) is desired, bridging translates twice: (source, bridge), then (bridge, target). The bridge language is also called a pivot language.

English is a common choice for the bridge because many languages have training data with English.

Applications

Translation without parallel data
Paraphrasing in a single language