In this paper two approaches to knowledge-lite terminology extraction are compared, both involving language filters which are used to remove ill-formed multi-word units (MWUs). A knowledge-lite approach entails swift portability to new languages and to new domains, which is difficult to achieve if knowledge-intensive resources such as grammars, parsers, taggers and lexicons are used. The two approaches described in this paper have been applied in monolingual term extraction for translation purposes as well as in a pre-processing stage for bilingual word and MWU alignment. The implemented software has been tested for Swedish, English, German and French.