Charlotte Vaughn
2025
Toward Machine Translation Literacy: How Lay Users Perceive and Rely on Imperfect Translations
Yimin Xiao
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Yongle Zhang
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Dayeon Ki
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Calvin Bao
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Marianna J. Martindale
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Charlotte Vaughn
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Ge Gao
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Marine Carpuat
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
As Machine Translation (MT) becomes increasingly commonplace, understanding how the general public perceives and relies on imperfect MT is crucial for contextualizing MT research in real-world applications. We present a human study conducted in a public museum (n=452), investigating how fluency and adequacy errors impact bilingual and non-bilingual users’ reliance on MT during casual use. Our findings reveal that non-bilingual users often over-rely on MT due to a lack of evaluation strategies and alternatives, while experiencing the impact of errors can prompt users to reassess future reliance. This highlights the need for MT evaluation and NLP explanation techniques to promote not only MT quality, but also MT literacy among its users.
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- Calvin Bao 1
- Marine Carpuat 1
- Ge Gao (高歌) 1
- Dayeon Ki 1
- Marianna Martindale 1
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