Example based translation apparatus, translation method, and translation program

A translation apparatus is provided that includes a bilingual example sentence dictionary that stores plural example sentences in a first language and plural example sentences in a second language being translation of the plural example sentences, an input unit that inputs an input sentence in the first language, a first search unit that searches whether the input sentence matches any of the plural example sentences in the first language, a second search unit that searches for at least one example sentence candidate that is similar to the input sentence from the plural example sentences in the first language, when a matching example sentence is not found in the first search unit, and an output unit that outputs an example sentence in the second language that is translation of an example sentence searched in the first search unit or the example sentence candidate searched in the second search unit.