A de facto human‐machine cooperation relationship has become the elephant in the room for a while, but the current situation might not be exact and needs further examination. There are tradeoffs in human and machine translation, both approaches have its strength and weakness in particular circumstances, and neither under current conditions possess the ability to fully take over the role of the other. Through a brief exploration of current progress from researchers around the globe, the hypothesis is that there might be great potential for human‐machine cooperation to balance the power between translation originalism and translation activism to achieve both efficiency and quality in human‐machine cooperation.