Enhancing bilingual electronic group meeting comprehension with round-trip translations

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.Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Aiken, M. and Park, M. (2009) 'Enhancing bilingual electronic group meeting comprehension with round-trip translations', Int.Mina Park graduated with a PhD in Management Information Systems from the University of Mississippi. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of MIS in the School of Business at Northern State University, South Dakota. Her primary research interests include all aspects of multilingual electronic meeting systems, and she has extensive experience facilitating multilingual discussions. Currently, she is investigating how very large multilingual groups can use the technology, how the technology can be used with mobile devices and how users can interactively influence translation quality.

A Multilingual Chat System with Image Presentation for Detecting Mistranslation

“…Aiken and Park [2] used a method called RTT (round-trip translation) and implemented a system where speakers can preview their speech to check their correctness. As a result, those who used RTT estimated the accuracy of the German translations better than those who did not use it.…”