In this position paper, we examine ways in which researchers in machine translation and translation studies have approached the problem of evaluating the output of machine translation systems and, more broadly, the questions of what it means to define translation quality. We explore their similarities and differences, highlighting the role that the purpose and context of translation plays in translation studies approaches. We argue that evaluation of machine translation (e.g., in shared tasks) would benefit from additional insights from translation studies, and we suggest the introduction of an ‘evaluation brief” (analogous to the ‘translation brief’) which could help set out useful context for annotators tasked with evaluating machine translation.