A machine translation quality determination mechanism uses comparisons of subsequent and potentially numerous reverse translations of a translated human language back to the source language. The process of translating from source language to target language to source language may iterate many times to ultimately yield information as to an assertion of low quality translation. Thus, the present invention continuously iterates this "back-and-forth" translation until the resulting source human language text is not reasonably equivalent to the original source human language or until the process iterates a predetermined number of times. If the back-and-forth translation results in a source human language text that is not reasonably equivalent to the original source text, then the translation is identified as low quality.