Methods of Phrase to Phrase Translation

I don't know of any work on phrase translation, but this paper on phrase-to-phrase alignment is interesting.

This paper (in French, except for the following abstract) tried to examine how to determine which words might or might not have literal translations:

Identification d'erreurs de traduction dans un dictionnaire de recherche d'informations translingue et traduction de mots composés à l'aide du World Wide Web - H. Naets, G. Grefenstette - CORIA'05

http://www-list.cea.fr/gb/publications/docs/si/ingenierie_connaissance/fr/CORIA2005_naetz_identification_erreurs_traduction.pdf

Cross-language information retrieval over non parallel text requires a translation phase between a source language query and a target language document. In order to achieve the same performance as a monolingual target language query, good translations for all terms in a source language query must be found. Unfortunately, available translation dictionaries do not contain exact translations for many multiword terms that can be found in a query. Cross language retrieval systems use statistically or manually built translation dictionaries to perform translation, and in order to translate a multiword term, many systems generate possible word-to-word translations and verify the existence of the translations in the target database. When validated translations of multiword structures are used, retrieval improves. But there are two unsolved problems with the generate-and-validate method: (1) if the proper translation for one word in the multiword term is not in the translation dictionary the translation that will be validated by the method will not be the best translation, and (2) if the multiword term in the source is not translated by the same number of nonstop words in the target language, then the best translation will not be generated. In this paper, we present two methods for recognizing when these situations arise.