The Number That Started a Tool
A corpus of seventy-nine technical courses, each published in two languages. The English was written first, because it had to be: the code samples must match, the links must match, the syllabus must be one course rather than two. Then the same author wrote the Korean.
An audit read the Korean. Sixty-seven of the seventy-nine had the same defect. Not a typo class, not a formatting slip — the sentences kept their English words in English clause order and translated only the joints, so the Korean was grammar without vocabulary. Fluent enough to pass a spellchecker and wrong enough that a native reader stumbles on every third sentence.
Here is the part that turns a quality problem into an architecture problem. Three successive generations of explicit rules had been in force the whole time. "Do not translate — think in Korean and write." Every author could recite it. Every author agreed with it. Every author was trying to follow it. The rule got sharper each generation, and the corpus got worse.
What the Defect Actually Looks Like
You do not need Korean to see it, because the defect is structural rather than lexical. Look at what stayed English in a sentence that is supposed to be Korean: the nouns, the verbs, the adverbs — everything that carries meaning. What got translated was the connective tissue: the particles, the endings, the little grammatical hinges.
That inversion is the whole signature. A person writing Korean picks Korean words and arranges them in Korean order. A person translating picks the source sentence and swaps its skeleton, because the source is right there, already shaped, and re-shaping it costs more than dressing it.
Why This Is Not a Discipline Problem
The reflex response to a 67-of-79 failure rate is to conclude that people were careless, and to write a better rule. Test that theory against the population. A discipline problem has a specific shape: the failures cluster among people who did not know the rule, did not believe in it, or were under time pressure that made ignoring it rational. Here the failing set included the authors who could quote the rule verbatim, who had themselves argued for it, and who had no deadline at all.
When a failure survives knowledge, agreement, and motivation, you have measured the arrangement, not the people. And the arrangement was this: the author writing Korean had the finished English sitting in working memory, because they had just written it. They were asked to not use it. Asking someone to hold something in mind and not draw on it is asking them to forget on command — which is the one thing minds do not do on request.