This paper provides an overview of the research and development activities carried out to alleviate the language resources' bottleneck in machine translation within the Abu-MaTran project. We have developed a range of tools for the acquisition of the main resources required by the two most popular approaches to machine translation, i.e. statistical (corpora) and rule-based models (dictionaries and rules). All these tools have been released under open-source licenses and have been developed with the aim of being useful for industrial exploitation.