In this article we outline a basic approach to treating metonymy properly in a multilingual machine translation system. This is the first attempt at treating metonymy in an machine translation environment. The approach is guided by the differences of acceptability of metonymy which were obtained by our comparative survey among three languages, English, Chinese, and Japanese. The characteristics of the approach are as follows: (1) Influences of the context, individuals, and familiality with metonymy are not used. (2) An actual acceptability of each metonymic expression is not realized directly. (3) .
