That's a very huge project. It's best to start with one of the commonly-used toolkits for machine translation, such as Moses and Giza++: http://www.statmt.org/

That's a very huge project. It's best to start with one of the commonly-used toolkits for machine translation, such as Moses and Giza++: http://www.statmt.org/moses/ http://www.statmt.org/moses/ http://code.google.com/p/giza-pp/ http://code.google.com/p/giza-pp/ When using a statistical method, you also need training data. One good source is the EuroParl corpus, which is based on translations of texts of the European parliament: http://www.statmt.org/europarl/ http://www.statmt.org/europarl/ The programming language is not really important. Use whatever makes it the easiest to use one of the existing toolkits. Note that this is a very active field of research in natural language processing, and open domain machine translation is hard to do correctly. Also, the more data, the merrier. Syntax-based systems also require a parser in the pipeline (and good-quality syntactic annotations for the training data). Since (please do not feel offended) your question seems a bit naïve, let me advise you to do two things if possible: 1. follow a course in machine learning, 2. follow a course in natural language processing, covering at least parsing and MT.