Patent ID: 7295962

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving an input text segment in a source language; and translating the input text segment to a translated text segment in a target language using both a statistical decoding algorithm and text strings in a translation memory; wherein said translating comprises: matching at least a portion of the input text segment with a first text segment in a translation memory, replacing the at least a portion of the input text segment with a text segment in a target language in the translation memory corresponding to the first text segment, generating an initial target language translation of the input text segment, and generating a target language translation by performing a statistical machine translation decoding operation on the initial translation; wherein said performing the statistical machine translation decoding operation comprises: performing one or more sentence modification operations to the current target language translation to generate one or more modified target language translations, said current target language translation comprising the initial target language translation in a first instance, determining whether one or more of the modified target language translations represents an improved translation in comparison with the current target language translation, setting a modified target language translation as the current target language translation, and repeating said applying, said determining and said setting until occurrence of a termination condition, wherein said performing one or more sentence modification operations comprises changing in the current target language translation a translation of a word and concurrently inserting another word at a position that yields an alignment of highest probability between the source language text segment and the current target language translation, the inserted other word having a high probability of having a zero-value fertility.