We describe key aspects of an ongoing project to implement a rule-based English-to-Amharic and Amharic-to-English machine translation system within our L3 framework. L3 is based on Extensible Dependency Grammar (Debusmann, 2007), a multi-layered dependency grammar formalism that relies on constraint satisfaction for parsing and generation. In L3, we extend XDG to multiple languages and translation. This requires a mechanism to handle cross-lingual relationships and mismatches in the number of words between source and target languages. In this paper, we focus on these features as well as the advantages that L3 offers for handling structural divergences between English and Amharic and its capacity to accommodate shallow and deep translation within a single system.
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