The development of a machine translation system (Mts) requires many tradeoffs in terms of the variety of available formalisms and control mechanisms. The tradeoffs involve issues in the generative power of grammar, formal linguistic power and efficiency of the parser, manipulation flexibility for knowledge bases, knowledge acquisition, degree of expressiveness and uniformity of the system, integration of the knowledge sources, and so forth. This paper discusses some basic decisions which must be made in constructing a large system. The authors' experience with an operational English-Chinese Mts, ArchTran, is presented to illustrate decision making related to procedural tradeoffs.