Approaches to the automation of machine translation (MT) evaluation have attempted, or presumed, to connect some rapidly measurable phenomenon with general attributes of the MT output and/or system. In particular, measurements of the fluency of output are often asserted to be predictive of the usefulness of MT output in information-intensive, downstream tasks. The connections between the fluency (“intelligibility”) of translation and its informational adequacy (“fidelity”) are not actually straightforward. This paper discussed a small experiment in isolating a particular contrastive linguistic phenomena common to both French-English and Spanish-English pairs, and attempts to associate that behavior in machine and human translations with known fidelity properties of those translations. Our results show a definite correlative trend.