No substitute when the translators are lying? Gimme a break. Machines can be back-up with redundant translations to catch fraud? Why not when lives are on the line? You are mixing two different issues, competency and loyalty.
Machine Translation (MT) is not yet sophisticated enough in the languages we are discussing to translate, much less detect fraud. There is, as yet, no substitute for qualified human translators.
What's more, I know for a fact the federal gov't is heavily involved in MT research and application.
If you give the same work to two people to "translate" and you get different 'reads' - then one is lying. That's one issue. The other one is machines. Machines are great to pull key words out of tons of chatter, but I do understand your point. And you're right, our machines aren't there yet, but necessity is the mother of invention and all that...
Machine Translation (MT) is not yet sophisticated enough in the languages we are discussing to translate, much less detect fraud. There is, as yet, no substitute for qualified human translators.