Is That Your Final Answer? 
 The purpose of this research is to test the efficacy of applying automated evaluation techniques , originally devised for the evaluation of human language learners , to the output of machine translation (MT) systems . We believe that these evaluation techniques will provide information about both the human language learning process , the translation process and the development of machine translation systems . This, the first experiment in a series of experiments, looks at the intelligibility of MT output . A language learning experiment showed that assessors can differentiate native from non-native language essays in less than 100 words . Even more illuminating was the factors on which the assessors made their decisions. We tested this to see if similar criteria could be elicited from duplicating the experiment using machine translation output . Subjects were given a set of up to six extracts of translated newswire text . Some of the extracts were expert human translations , others were machine translation outputs . The subjects were given three minutes per extract to determine whether they believed the sample output to be an expert human translation or a machine translation . Additionally, they were asked to mark the word at which they made this decision. The results of this experiment, along with a preliminary analysis of the factors involved in the decision making process will be presented here. 