1. A machine translation decoding method comprising: receiving as input a text segment in a source language to be translated into a target language; generating an initial translation as a current target language translation; applying one or more modification operators to the current target language translation to generate one or more modified target language translations; 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.