A method and computer-readable medium are provided that perform a series of steps associated with machine translation. These steps include using a first text in a first language and a second text in a second language, to produce an association list where words in the first language are associated with words in the second language. A first syntactic structure for a sentence from the first text is aligned with a second syntactic structure for a sentence in the second text based on the association list without referring to a bilingual dictionary of content words. The association list is also used during translations. Specifically, a word in the first language is translated into a word in the second language based on an entry in the association list without referring to a bilingual dictionary that contains content words. Thus, training and translation are performed without the need for a bilingual dictionary of content words.