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This paper attempts to investigate the relationship between the source text difficulty and the quality of machine translation output. We examined the results of human evaluation of the Korean-English statutory translation by Google Translate and the source text difficulty measured in terms of lexical and terminological difficulty and syntactic complexity. The translations of two different statutes revealed varying correlation patterns examined in terms of fluency, accuracy, terminology and others. The results demonstrate that the two source texts’ syntactic complexity had a negative correlation with the machine translation quality evaluation. In other words, Google Translate was found to be weak at translating long and syntactically complex sentences. On the other hand, lexical and terminological difficulty did not have any correlation with the results of human evaluation despite the fact that statutes contain a lot of difficult words. Overall, the source text difficulty had a strong negative correlation with the human evaluation results, which was generally supported by the evaluators’ comments on fluency and accuracy errors.