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) Grouping metonymic examples into patterns is determined by the acceptability judgement of the speakers surveyed as well as the analysts' intuition.(4) The analysis and generation components treat metonymy differently using the patterns.(5) The analysis component accepts a wider range of metonymy than the actual results of the survey, and the generation component treats metonymy more strictly than the actual results.We think that the approach is a starting point for more sophisticated approaches to translation in a multilingual machine translation environment.