In this paper we propose several novel approaches to improve phrase reordering for statistical machine translation in the framework of maximum-entropy-based modeling. A smoothed prior probability is introduced to take into account the distortion effect in the priors. In addition to that we propose multiple novel distortion features based on syntactic parsing. A new metric is also introduced to measure the effect of distortion in the translation hypotheses. We show that both smoothed priors and syntax-based features help to significantly improve the reordering and hence the translation performance on a large-scale Chinese-to-English machine translation task. 1