I think ultimately this endeavor would run into the same issues which befell the efforts of the GOFAI research program. A translation layer would need to "under

I think ultimately this endeavor would run into the same issues which befell the efforts of the GOFAI research program. A translation layer would need to "understand" embedded higher-order contexts of language making implicit references to the world, and which vary by different languages and cultures. Such contexts are not analytically decomposable in a manner which permits a centralized mapping. As with GOFAI, a formalized representation of meaning entails certain ontological assumptions about "how the world hangs together". These assumptions often hold true for an isolated domain of inquiry but falter when dealing with more complex phenomena. I could, however, see such a system useful for 'Simple Wikipedia' articles which largely consist of existentially quantifiable sentences. There is a wealth of philosophical scholarship on the issues of semantics and formal representation; I recommend the works of Hubert Dreyfus if you want to dig into this more.