A translation system comprises an image reading unit that optically reads an image of a manuscript and generates image data; an inputting unit that inputs a translation target language; a character recognizing unit that generates an original text by performing a character recognition process on the image data generated by the image reading unit; a translation text database in which are associated and stored translation texts, language identifiers which specify the languages in which the translation texts are written, and document identifiers which specify the contents of the translation texts; an extracting unit that extracts the document identifier which specifies the content of the original text from the original text; a searching unit that searches the translation text database for a translation text associated with a document identifier identical to the document identifier extracted from the original text by the extracting unit and a language identifier identical to the language identifier which specifies the translation target language input by the inputting unit; and an outputting unit that outputs the translation text searched by the searching unit.