A simple but powerful scheme for distributed source coding based on the concept of binning and symbol-based turbo codes is proposed. The previous works on the compression with side information (SI) using turbo codes and the binning technique are focused on binary turbo codes. The source is considered to be binary or is converted to a binary stream. This conversion, however, reduces the redundancy that could be exploited by the compression algorithm. To achieve higher compression efficiency, we propose using a scheme based on a turbo decoder that decides over symbols rather than bits. The results demonstrate improved performance