This paper presents a look inside the ITC-irst large-vocabulary SMT system developed for the NIST 2005 Chinese-to-English evaluation campaign. Experiments on official NIST test sets provide a thorough overview of the performance of the system, supplying information on how single components contribute to the global performance. The presented system exhibits performance comparable to that of the best systems participating in the NIST 2002-2004 MT evaluation campaigns: on the three test sets, achieved BLEU scores are 26.35%, 26.92% and 28.13%, respectively.