A method of statistical machine translation (SMT) is provided. The method comprises generating reordering knowledge based on the syntax of a source language (SL) and a number of alignment matrices that map sample SL sentences with sample target language (TL) sentences. The method further comprises receiving a SL word string and parsing the SL word string into a parse tree that represents the syntactic properties of the SL word string. The nodes on the parse tree are reordered based on the generated reordering knowledge in order to provide reordered word strings. The method further comprises translating a number of reordered word strings to create a number of TL word strings, and identifying a statistically preferred TL word string as a preferred translation of the SL word string.