In this paper we describe and evaluate a top-down transfer component of a hybrid example-based machine translation system with an architecture similar to that of transfer MT systems, but with automatically derived transfer-rules and dictionary entries based on a parallel treebank. The tests were applied on the translation pair Dutch to English. Evaluation and error analysis have shown that the top-down transfer process has a number of shortcomings on which we wish to report and which we will try to solve in future work by applying bottom-up transfer.