Backtranslation is a process of re-translating the text translated to the target language back to the source language, which is applied for multiple purposes, e.g. teaching, testing and research in translantology, and is considered to be an effective tool in presenting students with the differences which exist between the pairs of languages. The present research employs the texts referring to the three fields, namely economics, ICT, and science and technology, which were backtranslated with the application of machine translation analysed from the perspective of developing the digital competence of translation students. The digital world is developing exponentially, with a great number of monolingual and bilingual texts being added to the web every day. Due to a number of texts that are processed by the software, the precision of machine translation evolves rapidly. The aim of this research is to carry out the contrastive analysis of three back-translated texts on the word, sentence and text level. The two most common pairs of languages that the students of the programme Technical Translation, Riga Technical University specialise in are selected for the analysis: English ñ Latvian, English ñ Russian.