Predicting Prepositions for SMT Marion Weller, Alexander Fraser, Sabine Schulte im Walde The translation of prepositions is a difficult task for machine translation; a preposition must convey the source-side meaning and also meet target-side constraints. In our approach, we move the selection of prepositions out of the translation system into a post-processing component. During translation, we use an abstract representation of prepositions as a place-holder that serves as a basis for the generation of prepositions in the post-processing step. In this step all subcategorized elements of a verb are considered and allotted to their respective functions – as PPs with an overt preposition or as NPs with an “empty” preposition.