One of the reasons that machine translation cannot replace professional human translation is the same reason that plain old bilingual laypeople, for many tasks, cannot replace professional human translation. For most translation jobs, the task of translation requires more than just knowledge of two languages. The idea that you can simply create one-to-one equivalencies across languages is false.Translators are not walking dictionaries. They recreate language. They craft beautiful phrases and sentences to make them have the same impact as the source. Often, they devise brand-new ways of saying things, and to do so, they draw upon a lifetime’s worth of knowledge derived from living in two cultures. Machines cannot exactly do that.