We construct generalized translation networks to approximate uniformly a class of nonlinear, continuous functionals defined on L p ([—1, 1] s ) for integer s ≥ 1, 1 ≤ p < ∞, or C([—1, 1] s ). We obtain lower bounds on the possible order of approximation for such functionals in terms of any approximation process depending continuously on a given number of parameters. Our networks almost achieve this order of approximation in terms of the number of parameters (neurons) involved in the network. The training is simple and noniterative; in particular, we avoid any optimization such as that involved in the usual backpropagation.