A Japanese-to-Chinese machine translation apparatus includes, a translation dictionary memory that stores a Japanese-to-Chinese translation dictionary; a thesaurus memory that stores a Japanese thesaurus; a translation dictionary searching unit that searches the Japanese-to-Chinese translation dictionary for a Chinese word associated with an input Japanese word; a thesaurus searching unit that searches the Japanese thesaurus for the synonym associated the input Japanese word when plural Chinese words are hit as a result of search, a similarity calculating unit that calculates a degree of similarity between the synonym and the plural Chinese words for each Chinese word, and a translation selecting unit that selects a Chinese word with a highest degree of similarity as a translation of the input Japanese word.