Abstract Due to the sparsity of data and the limitation of bilingual data size, many high-quality phrase pairs can’t be generated. The example-based phrase pairs proposed by the authors are generated through decomposing, substituting and generating the typical phrase pairs, and the typical phrase pairs are generated by the typical phrase extraction method in phrase-based statistical machine translation. On the Chinese-to-English Newswire and Oral translation tasks, the experimental results demonstrate significant improvements achieved by the proposed methods. Moreover, a gain of about 1% BLEU score increase is yielded on some test sets.