In this paper we explore the utility of Machine Translation as a writing aid and its impact on
the quality of the text produced. We focus on medical practitioners who are native speakers
of Spanish and who need to publish their scientific work in English as a foreign language.
After carrying out a general survey to determine whether Spanish-speaking medical practitioners
already use MT as a writing aid, we engaged five participants in an experiment where
we asked them to write a paper in Spanish that was subsequently machine translated. They
were then asked to post-edit the MT output. We analyse their post-edits and further attempt
to evaluate the overall quality of their texts by engaging a professional proofreader. Our results
suggest that the texts produced with the help of MT+post-editing still require many edits
in order to be considered of acceptable quality. In the conclusion, we identify several avenues
worthy of future investigation and that could help achieve better quality.