The rule-to-rule hypothesis says that every syntax rule has its counterpart in semantics. If we replace semantics with translation, we get a basic concept a machine translation system can rely on. Syntax-translation pairs are represented by pairs of patterns where pattern can stand for both rules and lexical items. Combining the advantages of example-based and rule-based machine translation, a new paradigm, pattern-based translation is introduced. The system called MetaMorpho, based on these principles, has been tested for English-Hungarian translation, and show promising results both in translation quality and speed.