A system and method for hybrid machine translation approach is based on a statistical transfer approach using statistical and linguistic features. The system and method may be used to translate from one language into another. The system may include at least one database, a rule based translation module, a statistical translation module and a hybrid machine translation engine. The database(s) store source and target text and rule based language models and statistical language models. The rule based translation module translates source text based on the rule based language models. The statistical translation module translates source text based on the statistical language models. A hybrid machine translation engine, having a maximum entropy algorithm, is coupled to the rule based translation module and the statistical translation module and is capable of translating source text into target text based on the rule based and statistical language models.