The invention provides a retelling phrase acquisition method. The method comprises: executing primary translation and secondary translation by utilizing a statistic machine translation system to obtain a primary translation result and a secondary translation result in sequence, wherein the primary translation is translation from a source phrase to an intermediate phrase, and the secondary translation is translation from the intermediate phrase to a retelling phrase; and according to the primary translation result and the secondary translation result, determining an associative relationship between the source phrase and the retelling phrase. The invention furthermore provides a retelling phrase acquisition apparatus and a retelling phrase based question rewriting method and apparatus.