Abstract
The United Nations, the European Union, and many other organizations must conduct meetings in many languages, but typically employ human interpreters with their accompanying cost. In addition, these oral discussions require participants to take turns speaking, lengthening the process. Many studies have shown that group support systems can reduce meeting time and increase productivity, and the addition of automatic translation into this process could support these multilingual groups. However, prior studies have typically used only a few languages with group members face to face. This study investigates how well a large multilingual group can use electronic meeting software in a geographically dispersed environment. Results show that the group members were able to understand comments exchanged in 66 languages when translated to English, and they believed the multilingual meeting system was useful for such discussions.
Highlights
Several multinational organizations conduct meetings in many languages
Studies should use participants typing their own comments in the foreign languages to understand how real multilingual groups work
Some studies have shown that translations among Western European languages (e.g., German, Spanish, Dutch, etc.) work very well together [3]
Summary
Several multinational organizations conduct meetings in many languages. For example, the European Union uses 24 official, working languages. Traditional, oral meetings with simultaneous translation are slow and have high costs. Relatively few international meetings are interpreted, and many instead use just one language for communication, e.g. English [18]. Discussions are automatically transcribed in automated meetings. Several studies have investigated the use of electronic meetings with machine translation as a substitute for oral discussions with interpretation [21]. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how well a multilingual group might potentially be supported in an electronic meeting that provides automatic translation among 80 languages for participants in different locations. We discuss in greater detail the problems inherent in multilingual meetings, and we review prior research on how computer-based systems have addressed these problems
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