The current paper presents a languageindependent methodology, which facilitates the creation of machine translation (MT) systems for various language pairs. This methodology is implemented in the PRESEMT hybrid MT system. PRESEMT has the lowest possible requirements on specialised resources and tools, given that for many languages (especially less widely used ones) only limited linguistic resources are available. In PRESEMT, the main translation process comprises two phases. The first one, Structure selection, determines the overall structure of a target language (TL) sentence, drawing on syntactic information from a small bilingual corpus. The second phase,