This paper proposes a novel method for phrase-based statistical machine translation by using pivot language. To conduct translation between languages Lf and Le with a small bilingual corpus, we bring in a third language Lp, which is named the pivot language. For Lf-Lp and Lp-Le, there exist large bilingual corpora. Using only Lf-Lp and Lp-Le bilingual corpora, we can build a translation model for Lf-Le. The advantage of this method lies in that we can perform translation between Lf and Le even if there is no bilingual corpus available for this language pair. .
