1. A method comprising: receiving by a machine translation system an input string in a source language; detecting by the machine translation system a noun phrase and a prepositional phrase in the input string; generating by the machine translation system possible translations in a target language for the noun phrase and the prepositional phrase; generating a ranked n-best list of candidate translations for the possible translations of the noun phrase and the prepositional phrase; generating by the machine translation system a translation of a remaining portion of the input string in the target language; and integrating the one or more n-best translations for the noun phrase and the prepositional phrase into the translation of the remaining portion of the input string to generate one or more sentence translations.