15. A computer-implemented 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 by the computer as an initial current target language translation; estimating a probability of correctness of the initial translation by the computer, the probability based on alignment links between words and phrases in the source language and words and phrases in the target language; applying one or more modification operators by the computer to the initial current target language translation to generate one or more modified target language translations; estimating a probability of correctness of the one or more modified target language translations, the probability based on alignment links between words and phrases in the source language and words and phrases in the target language; determining by the computer whether one or more of the modified target language translations represents an improved translation in comparison with the initial current target language translation by comparing the estimated probability of correctness of the initial translation with the estimated probability of correctness of the one or more modified target language translations; iteratively modifying the current target language translation of the source language text segment based on the determination; and repeating said applying, said determining and said iteratively modifying until occurrence of a termination condition.
15. A computer-implemented 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 by the computer as an initial current target language translation; estimating a probability of correctness of the initial translation by the computer, the probability based on alignment links between words and phrases in the source language and words and phrases in the target language; applying one or more modification operators by the computer to the initial current target language translation to generate one or more modified target language translations; estimating a probability of correctness of the one or more modified target language translations, the probability based on alignment links between words and phrases in the source language and words and phrases in the target language; determining by the computer whether one or more of the modified target language translations represents an improved translation in comparison with the initial current target language translation by comparing the estimated probability of correctness of the initial translation with the estimated probability of correctness of the one or more modified target language translations; iteratively modifying the current target language translation of the source language text segment based on the determination; and repeating said applying, said determining and said iteratively modifying until occurrence of a termination condition. 24. The method of claim 15 wherein iteratively modifying the translation comprises incrementally improving the translation with each iteration.