In this paper, we present the results of our investigation into phrase-based statistical machine translation from English
into Turkish – an agglutinative language with very productive inflectional and derivational word-formation processes. We investigate
different representational granularities for morphological structure and find that (i) representing both Turkish and English
at the morpheme-level but with some selective morpheme-grouping on the Turkish side of the training data, (ii) augmenting
the training data with “sentences” comprising only the content words of the original training data to bias root word alignment,
and with highly-reliable phrase-pairs from an earlier corpus-alignment (iii) re-ranking the n-best morpheme-sequence outputs
of the decoder with a word-based language model, and (iv) “repairing” translated words with incorrect morphological structure
and words which are out-of-vocabulary relative to the training and the language model corpus, provide an non-trivial improvement
over a word-based baseline despite our very limited training data. We improve from 19.77 BLEU points for our word-based baseline
model to 26.87 BLEU points for an improvement of 7.10 points or about 36% relative. We briefly discuss the applicability of
BLEU to morphologically complex languages like Turkish and present a simple extension to compare tokens not in a all-or-none
fashion but taking lexical-semantic and morpho-semantic similarities into account, implemented in our BLEU+ tool.