Apertium is an open-source machine translation platform, aimed at related-language pairs but expanded to deal with more divergent language pairs. The platform provides

1. a language-independent machine translation engine
   2. tools to manage the linguistic data necessary to build a machine translation system for a given language pair and
   3. linguistic data for a growing number of language pairs.

Apertium uses a shallow-transfer machine translation engine which processes the input text in stages, as in an assembly line: de-formatting, morphological analysis, part-of-speech disambiguation, shallow structural transfer, lexical transfer, morphological generation, and re-formatting.