1. A method comprising: training a statistical translation model on a plurality of translation pairs, each translation pair including a text segment in a source language and a corresponding text segment in a target language; extracting a plurality of tuples from each of a plurality of said translation pairs, each tuple comprising a pair of phrases and a corresponding word level alignment between said pair of phrases, the pair of phrases including a phrase in the source language comprising at least two words and a corresponding phrase in the target language comprising at least two words, the corresponding word level alignment based on the trained statistical translation model; and constructing automatically a statistical translation memory from said plurality of tuples, wherein the statistical translation memory encodes a plurality of said pair of phrases and the corresponding word level alignment between each said pair.