Title: Enhancing bilingual electronic group meeting comprehension with round-trip translations

Authors: Milam Aiken, Mina Park

Addresses: School of Business Administration, University of Mississippi, P.O. Box 1848, University, MS 38677, USA. ' School of Business, Northern State University, 1200 S. Jay Street, Aberdeen, SD 57401, USA

Abstract: Multilingual groups can use electronic meeting technology to automatically translate typed comments into several languages, but participants cannot be sure how well their comments are understood by those speaking other languages unless a translation preview is provided. Here, we describe a multilingual meeting system that presents to each user a round-trip translation (RTT) after each comment is typed, allowing them to revise a comment if the preview is poor. In a study of how English speakers use the system with automatic translation to German, results showed that the participants thought the system and the preview feature were useful in a multilingual meeting. Those using the feature better estimated the accuracy of the German translations than those who did not use RTT, and there was a significant, positive correlation between the forward translations to German and the back translations to English, indicating that the accuracy can be predicted and comprehension can be enhanced in a bilingual meeting.

Keywords: electronic meetings; e-meetings; multilingual groups; round-trip translations; languages; typing; translation previews; comment revision; English; German; automatic translation; RTT; accuracy; forward translations; back translations; bilingual meetings; machine translation; comprehension; information systems; change management.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISCM.2009.032750

International Journal of Information Systems and Change Management, 2009 Vol.4 No.2, pp.103 - 116

Received: 12 Aug 2009
Accepted: 08 Oct 2009
Published online: 19 Apr 2010 *

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