Software learns to translate by reading up

"Translation software that develops an understanding of languages by scanning through thousands of previously translated documents has been released by US researchers. Most existing translation software uses hand-coded rules for transposing words and phrases. But the new software, developed by Kevin Knight and Daniel Marcu at the Information Sciences Institute, part of the University of Southern California, US, takes a statistical approach, building probabilistic rules about words, phrases and syntactic structures." - New Scientist