According to one embodiment, a machine translation apparatus includes the following elements. The machine translation unit performs machine translation on a first text in a first language to generate a first machine translation result in a second language. The retrieval unit retrieves a first question sentence in the first language similar to the first text to obtain a degree of similarity between the first text and the first question sentence. The determination unit determines a first answer sentence in the first language corresponding to the first question sentence to be an output target when the degree of similarity is higher than a threshold and determines the first machine translation result to be an output target when the degree of similarity is lower than the threshold.