Statistical machine translation

Statistical machine translation (SMT) is a machine translation approach where translations are generated on the basis of statistical models whose parameters are derived from the analysis of bilingual text corpora. The statistical approach contrasts with the rule-based approaches to machine translation as well as with example-based machine translation, that superseded the previous rule-based approach that required explicit description of each and every linguistic rule, which was costly, and which often did not generalize to other languages.

Source: Wikipedia — Statistical machine translation (CC BY-SA 4.0)