Sparse approximation using redundant dictionaries is an efficient tool for many applications in the field of signal processing. The performances largely depend on the adaptation of the dictionary to the signal to decompose. As the statistical dependencies are most of the time not obvious in natural high-dimensional data, learning fundamental patterns is an alternative to analytical design of bases and has become a field of acute research. Most of the time, the underlying patterns of a class of signals can be found at any time, and in the design of a dictionary, this translation invariance property should be present. We present a new algorithm for learning short generating functions, each of them building a set of atoms corresponding to all its translations. The resulting dictionary is highly redundant and translation invariant.