Implementations herein relate to methods and devices for generating candidate translations and for quantizing text as well as words. A method may include generating, by a computing device, pending candidate translations of text to be translated based on predetermined translation rules. The computing device may generate translation probabilities from the text to be translated to the pending candidate translations based on features having impacts on translation probabilities of the pending candidate translations and a predetermined translation probability prediction model. The computing device may then select a predetermined number of pending candidate translations that have the translation probabilities higher than other pending candidate translations in the pending candidate translations to be the candidate translations of the text to be translated. In implementations, the features having impacts on the translation probabilities may include degrees of semantic similarity between the text to be translated and the candidate translations.