METIS-II, the MT system presented in this paper, does not view translation as a transfer process between a source language (SL) and a target one (TL), but rather as a matching procedure of patterns within a language pair. More specifically, translation is considered to be an assignment problem, i.e. a problem of discovering each time the best matching patterns between SL and TL, which the system is called to solve by employing patternmatching techniques. Most importantly, however, METIS-II is innovative because it does not need bilingual corpora for the translation process, but exclusively relies on monolingual corpora of the target language