The word translation task and the word-sense disambiguation task have the same form: each word a is associated with a set of possible labels U a ; given a sentence s containing word a, we must determine which of the possible labels in U a to assign to a in the context s. The only difference in the two tasks is the set U a : for word translation it is the set of possible translations of a, while for word sense disambiguation it is the set of possible senses of a in some ontology.
we may use any word sense disambiguation algorithm as a word translation algorithm by appropriately defining the senses (assuming that the WSD algorithm does not assume that a particular ontology is used to choose the senses).