There has been a significant amount of research in machine translation within a ‘new’ paradigm of empirical approaches, often labelled collectively as ‘example-based’ approaches. The first manifestation of this approach caused some surprise and hostility among observers more used to different ways of working, but the techniques were quickly adopted and adapted by many researchers, often creating hybrid systems. This paper reviews the various research efforts within this paradigm reported to date, and attempts a categorization of different manifestations of the general approach.