The authors have designed, implemented and assessed an EBMT system that can be dubbed the 'purest ever built': it strictly does not make any use of variables, templates or patterns, does not have any explicit transfer component, and does not require any preprocessing or training of the aligned examples. It uses only a specific operation, proportional analogy, that implicitly neutralizes divergences between languages and captures lexical and syntactic variations along the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes without explicitly decomposing sentences into fragments. Exactly the same genuine implementation of such a core engine was evaluated on different tasks and language pairs. To begin with, the authors compared their system on two tasks of a previous MT evaluation campaign to rank it among other current state-of-the-art systems. Then, they illustrated the 'universality' of their system by participating in a recent MT evaluation campaign, with exactly the same core engine, for a wide variety of language pairs. Finally, they studied the influence of extra data like dictionaries and paraphrases on the system performance.