The Effect of Comment Errors in Multilingual Electronic Meetings

Previous studies of multilingual electronic meetings have shown that members often comprehend the automatic translations, but accuracy is affected by errors in the source comments. However, no study has investigated to what extent these text errors reduce understanding. An experiment with six groups of students showed that participants were able to comprehend translations from German to English, even when the source text contained 5% word errors, but translations from source comments with no errors were understood better. Further, the differences in comprehension affected students’ perceptions of the system’s ease of use and usefulness.