All human languages are open and complex communication systems. No machine translation system will ever be able to automatically translate all possible sentences from one language to another in high quality. One way to combat complexity and openness of language translation is to decompose the task into well-defined sequential subtasks and solve each using declarative, modular rules. This paper describes such an MT system. A language-independent MT Machine has been designed for the transformation of linguistic trees in a general fashion. A full MT system is composed of a sequence of instances of that machine. Finnish-English implementation is discussed.