11. The method of claim 8 , further comprising: determining a combined alignment using two or more bridge-based alignments based on two or more bridge languages; and using the combined alignment to generate a third candidate translation of the input text.
8. A method comprising: receiving, at one or computing devices, a direct alignment between a source language and a target language based on multi-lingual parallel text, the multi-lingual parallel text associating the source language, the target language, and one or more bridge languages, the direct alignment representing a connection between words in the source language and the target language in the parallel text; receiving, at the one or more computing devices, a first bridge-based alignment for the parallel text between the source language and the target language using a first bridge language that is distinct from the source language and the target language, wherein the first bridge-based alignment is based in part on a first probability for a first alignment for the parallel text from the source language to the first bridge language and a second probability for a second alignment for the parallel text from the first bridge language to the target language; receiving, at the one or more computing devices, an input text in the source language to be translated to the target language; using the direct alignment for the parallel text between the source language and the target language to generate a first candidate translation of the input text from the source language to the target language; using the first bridge-based alignment to generate a second candidate translation of the input text from the source language to the target language; and determining, at the one or more computing devices, a consensus translation based on the first and second candidate translations.