A method is presented for incremental re-training of an SMT system, in which a local phrase table is created and incrementally updated as a file is translated and post-edited. It is shown that translation data from within the same file has higher value than other domain-specific data. In two technical domains, within-file data increases BLEU score by several full points. Furthermore, a strong recency effect is documented; nearby data within the file has greater value than more distant data. It is also shown that the value of translation data is strongly correlated with a metric defined over new occurrences of n-grams. Finally, it is argued that the incremental re-training prototype could serve as the basis for a practical system which could be interactively updated in real time in a post-editing setting. Based on the results here, such an interactive system has the potential to dramatically improve translation quality.