Machine Translation Effect on Communication: What Makes It Difficult to Communicate through Machine Translation?

Abstract

Intercultural collaboration facilitated by machine translation has gradually spread in various settings. Still, little is known as for the practice of machine-translation mediated communication. This paper investigates how machine translation affects intercultural communication in practice. Based on communication in which multilingual communication system is applied, we identify four communication types and its' influences on stakeholders' communication process, especially focusing on establishment and maintenance of common ground. Different from our expectation that quality of machine translation results determines communication process largely, our data indicates communication relies more on a dynamic process where participants establish common ground than on reproducibility and grammatical accuracy.