An approach to the Transfer phase of a Machine Translation system is presented, where the bilingual lexicon plays an active role, guiding Transfer by means of executable descriptions of word senses. The means for lexical sense specification are, however, general enough and can in principle apply to other system architectures, e.g. in the Generation phase if Transfer is intentionally kept minimal. The active lexicon is the one and only system component which is exposed to users and can serve to linguistically control Transfer effects. A unified approach to lexicon creation and maintenance is proposed, which contains means to gradually refine sense specification and tailor the definitions to specific text domains. The underlying linguistic principles, the nature of sense distinction required for translation, and the formal structure of the lexicon are discussed.
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