Analyzing misconceptions in multilingual computer-mediated communication

Abstract

Multilingual communities using machine translation to overcome language barriers are showing up with increasing frequency. However, when a large number of translation errors get mixed into conversation, it becomes difficult for users to fully understand each other. In this paper, we focus on misconceptions found in high volume in actual online conversations using machine translation. By comparing responses via machine translation and responses without machine translation, we extract two response patterns, which may be strongly related to the occurrence of misconceptions in machine translation-mediated communication. The two response patterns are that users tend to respond to short phrases of the original message and tend to trip on the wording of the original message when responding via machine translation.