Syntax-based translation models that operate on the output of a source-language parser have been shown to perform better if allowed to choose from a set of possible parses. In this paper, we investigate whether this is because it allows the translation stage to overcome parser errors or to override the syntactic structure itself. We find that it is primarily the latter, but that under the right conditions, the translation stage does correct parser errors, improving parsing accuracy on the Chinese Treebank. 1