Abstract In this work, we present novel approaches to exploit sentential context for neural machine translation (NMT). Specifically, we first show that a shallow sentential context extracted from the top encoder layer only, can improve translation performance via contextualizing the encoding representations of individual words. Next, we introduce a deep sentential context, which aggregates the sentential context representations from all the internal layers of the encoder to form a more comprehensive context representation. Experimental results on the WMT14 English?German and English?French benchmarks show that our model consistently improves performance over the strong TRANSFORMER model (Vaswani et al., 2017), demonstrating the necessity and effectiveness of exploiting sentential context for NMT