An iterative language translation system includes multiple communicatively connected statistical speech translation systems. The system includes an automatic speech recognition component adapted to recognize spoken language in a source language and to create a source language hypothesis. A machine translation component is adapted to translate the source language hypothesis into a target language. The system also includes a second automatic speech recognition component and second machine translation component. The translation results are used to adapt the automatic speech recognition components and the language hypotheses are used to adapt the machine translation components.