Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and non-transitory computer-readable storage media for presenting a machine translation and alternative translations to a user, where a selection of any particular alternative translation results in the re-ranking of the remaining alternatives. The system then presents these re-ranked alternatives to the user, who can continue proofing the machine translation using the re-ranked alternatives or by typing an improved translation. This process continues until the user indicates that the current portion of the translation is complete, at which point the system moves to the next portion.