Systems, methods, and computer program products are provided for statistical machine translation. In some implementations a method is provided. The method includes receiving multi-lingual parallel text associating a source language, a target language, and one or more bridge languages, determining an alignment between the source language and the target language using a first bridge language that is distinct from the source language and the target language, and using the determined alignment to generate a candidate translation of an input text in the source language to the target language.