The paper discusses a methodology of machine assisted translation (MAT) as an alternative to fully automatic MT. A prototype MAT system is described, which is an integration of a dictionary database system and a text editor. The functional requests for such a system from the linguistic point of view and some general problems of designing and implementing such systems are presented. Special attention is given to language-dependence, and to the problem of completeness and efficiency of the linguistic data representation for a very simple system. A statistic analysis of English inflexion and word derivation patterns is presented.