Machine Translation evaluation has been more magic and opinion than science. The history of MT evaluation is long and checkered - the search for objective, measurable, resource-reduced methods of evaluation continues. A recent trend towards task-based evaluation inspires the question - can we use methods of evaluation of language competence in language learners and apply them reasonably to MT evaluation? This paper is the first in a series of steps to look at this question. In this paper, we will present the theoretical framework for our ideas, the notions we ultimately aim towards and some very preliminary results of a small experiment along these lines.