If our goal is to promote progress towards highquality MT, we should investigate the creation of more expressive cross-lingual representations. The challenge is, then, to do so without compromising the undeniable strength of surface-based SMT. One of its strongest points is its robust descriptive nature that learns as much as possible from **data** while imposing only very few and general a priori constraints. Rather than advocating transfer systems based on specific linguistic theories, we believe that this philosophy should be upheld as much as possible as we explore more expressive transfer representations.