  This paper introduces Minimal Dependency Translation (MDT), an ongoing
project to develop a rule-based framework for the creation of rudimentary
bilingual lexicon-grammars for machine translation and computer-assisted
translation into and out of under-resourced languages as well as initial steps
towards an implementation of MDT for English-to-Amharic translation. The basic
units in MDT, called groups, are headed multi-item sequences. In addition to
wordforms, groups may contain lexemes, syntactic-semantic categories, and
grammatical features. Each group is associated with one or more translations,
each of which is a group in a target language. During translation, constraint
satisfaction is used to select a set of source-language groups for the input
sentence and to sequence the words in the associated target-language groups.
