An Analysis of Electronic Meeting Comment Translation

Multilingual groups often find communication difficult. Even with human interpreters, these groups still suffer from the inherent limitations of oral meetings: only one person at a time can talk, comments are not anonymous, and ideas must be recorded manually. Group Support Systems (GSS) have been used to increase the productivity of traditional, oral meetings by allowing participants to exchange automatically recorded, typed comments simultaneously and anonymously. Integration of language translation software with these systems could enable multilingual groups to achieve the same benefits obtained by monolingual groups. This paper investigates the feasibility of using automatic language translation in GSS meetings by converting sample comments from two archived transcripts typed in English to Spanish. Three human experts then evaluated these transcriptions for accuracy. Results showed that the translations contained numerous errors, but most of the comments could still be understood