The invention discloses a carapace bone script explanation machine translation method based on an example, which comprises the steps of: (a) building to finish a carapace bone script explanation-modern Chinese language bilingual corpus; (b) finishing the sentence alignment, the phrase alignment and the word alignment of the bilingual corpus, and building a translation example library; (c) inputting a carapace bone script explanation to be translated; (d) on the basis of the translation example library built in step (b), carrying out full-example matching or parts-of-example matching retrieval to the input carapace bone script explanation to be translated; (e) displaying a final translation result to a user via a display; and (f) evaluating the translation result, and adding a bilingual sentence pair which satisfies a paraphrasing requirement into the translation example library. With the carapace bone script explanation machine translation method based on an example, which utilizes the storage and inquiry advantages of the computer, burden of carapace bone script experts is lightened, and a carapace bone script research threshold is lowered.