The limited semantic knowledge is used in the phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT), which causes that the translation quality of long-distance verb and its object is low. A selectional preference based translation model is proposed, which inducts the semantic constraints that a verb imposes on its object to select the proper argument-head word for the predicate with long distance. The authors train the corpus to obtain the conditional probability based selectional preferences for verb, and integrate the selectional preferences into a phrase-based translation system and evaluate on a Chinese-to-English translation task with large-scale training data. Experiment results show that the integration of selectional preference into SMT can effectively capture the long-distance semantic dependencies and improve the translation quality.