In this thesis proposal I present my thesis work, about pre- and postprocessing for statistical machine translation, mainly into Germanic languages. I focus my work on four areas: compounding, definite noun phrases, reordering, and error correction. Initial results are positive within all four areas, and there are promising possibilities for extending these approaches. In addition I also focus on methods for performing thorough error analysis of machine translation output, which can both motivate and evaluate the studies performed.