The main aim of this article is to present the prototype hybrid Machine Translation (MT) system METIS. METIS is interesting in two ways. As regards MT for low and middle density languages, METIS relies on relatively cheap resources: monolingual corpora of the target language (TL), flat bilingual lexica and basic NLP tools (taggers, lemmatizers, chunkers). In terms of research, METIS uses pattern matching algorithms and patterns in an innovative way. In order to put the discussion of METIS in context and define the niche that this research prototype fills, the landscape of state-of-the-art Machine Translation, especially as regards low and middle-density languages, is briefly described.