Abstract: This paper firstly discussed the development of machine translation, secondly described the advantages and disadvantages of the rationalism and empiricism in natural language processing and machine translation, and thirdly introduced our basic ideas of combination of the rule-based approach and statistical approach. Furthermore, the paper deliberated the tendency of combination of the rationalism and empiricism in word sense disambiguation, finally summarizcd the developmental tendency of machine translation.

Key words: Machine translation, Natural language processing, Computational linguistics, Rationalist approach, Empiricist approach