The present invention performs machine translation by matching fragments
of a source language sentence to be translated to source language
portions of an example in example base. When all relevant examples have
been identified in the example base, the examples are subjected to phrase
alignment in which fragments of the target language sentence in each
example are aligned against the matched fragments of the source language
sentence in the same example. A translation component then substitutes
the aligned target language phrases from the matched examples for the
matched fragments in the source language sentence.