> Instead, what seems to have happened is that the existence of an "intermediate" representation was a deliberate architecture choice by human Google programmer

> Instead, what seems to have happened is that the existence of an "intermediate" representation was a deliberate architecture choice by human Google programmers. Which has been proposed as a machine translation technique for many, many years. Maybe Google are the first to learn an interlingua, but they are not the first to use the term, much less the concept.