In this paper, we propose a classification‐based approach for hybridizing statistical machine translation and rule‐based machine translation. Both the training dataset used in the learning of our proposed classifier and our feature extraction method affect the hybridization quality. To create one such training dataset, a previous approach used auto‐evaluation metrics to determine from a set of component machine translation (MT) systems which gave the more accurate translation (by a comparative method). Once this had been determined, the most accurate translation was then labelled in such a way so as to indicate the MT system from which it came. In this previous approach, when the metric evaluation scores were low, there existed a high level of uncertainty as to which of the component MT systems was actually producing the better translation. To relax such uncertainty or error in classification, we propose an alternative approach to such labeling; that is, a cut‐off method. In our experiments, using the aforementioned cut‐off method in our proposed classifier, we managed to achieve a translation accuracy of 81.5% — a 5.0% improvement over existing methods.