Although some success has been achieved in the design of front-end natural language processors to data base management systems, transporting the processor to various data base management systems has proven to be elusive. A transportable system must be modular; it must be able to adapt to radically different data domains; and it must be able to communicate with many different data managers. The system developed accomplishes this by maintaining its own knowledge base distinct from the target data base management system, so that no communication is needed between the natural language processor and the data manager during the parse. The knowledge base is developed by interviewing the system administrator about the structure and meaning of the elements in the target data base. The natural language processor then converts the natural language query into an unambiguous intermediate-language query, which is easily converted to P the target query language using simple syntactic methods.