Claude Piron, a long-time translator for the United Nations and the World Health Organization, wrote that machine translation, at its best, automates the easier part of a translator’s job; the harder and more time-consuming part usually involves doing extensive research to resolve ambiguities in the source text, which the grammatical and lexical exigencies of the target language require to be resolved:

Why does a translator need a whole workday to translate five pages, and not an hour or two? ….. About 90% of an average text corresponds to these simple conditions. But unfortunately, there’s the other 10%. It’s that part that requires six [more] hours of work. There are the ambiguities one has to resolve. For instance, the author of the source text, an Australian physician, cited the example of an epidemic which was declared during World War II in a “Japanese prisoner of war camp”. Was he talking about an American camp with Japanese prisoners or a Japanese camp with American prisoners? The English has two senses. It’s necessary therefore to do research, maybe to the extent of a phone call to Australia