Abstract: For each word occurring in Japanese text, a set of words co-occurring with it and their co-occurrence frequencies are extracted, where two words are regarded as co-occurring with each other when they occur in the same sentence. Likewise, for each word occurring in an English text that corresponds to the Japanese text, a set of words co-occurring with it and their co-occurrence frequencies are extracted. A correlation is calculated between a Japanese word and an English word based upon the co-occurrent word set of the Japanese word and that of the English word, with the assistance of a Japanese-English bilingual dictionary of basic words. The correlation is defined as the ratio of the number of possible correspondences between the two co-occurrent word sets to the total of the co-occurrence frequencies in the two co-occurrent word sets. Pairs of words having a mutually maximum correlation are selected as candidate translation pairs of words, and displayed on a display device.