8. The method of claim 7 , wherein the features are selected from the group consisting of features based on: a. a surface word form: word−1, word+1, where word−1 represents a first word of a pair of consecutive words in the translated text string and word+1 represents a second word of the pair, positioned after the first word; b. parts-of-speech: POS−1, POS+1, where POS−1 is a part of speech assigned to word−1 and POS+1 is a part of speech assigned to word+1; c. a character n-gram comprising n characters from the end of word−1 and m characters from the start of word+1, wherein m+n is at least 2; d. a character n-gram comprising n characters from the end of word−1 and m characters from the start of word+1, wherein the character n-grams are normalized by replacing characters are with phonetic approximations, and grouped into groups with similar phonetic distribution; and e. a frequency, in a training corpus, of at least one of: a bigram represented by word−1 word+1, a closed compound word derived from word−1 and word+1, a closed compound word derived from word−1 and another word, and a closed compound derived word from word+1 and another word.
7. The method of claim 1 , wherein the merging system comprises the merging model, the method further comprising extracting features for pairs of consecutive words in the translated target string.