Past research has shown that the ideal MT system should be modular and devoid of language pair specific information in its design. We describe here the assembly of TAMTAM (Traduction Automatique Microsoft), the French-English research MT system under development at Microsoft, which was constructed from a combination of pre-existing rule-based components and automatically created components. At this stage, the system has not been adapted either computationally or linguistically to the French-English context and yet it performs only slightly below the French-English Systran system in independent blind human evaluations