Abstract
This paper reports on an experiment investigating how effective free online machine translation (MT) is in helping Internet users to access the contents of websites written only in languages they do not know. This study explores the extent to which using Internet-based MT tools affects the confidence of web-surfers in the reliability of the information they find on websites available only in languages unfamiliar to them. The results of a case study for the language pair Italian-English involving 101 participants show that the chances of identifying correctly basic information (i.e. understanding the nature of websites and finding contact telephone numbers from their web-pages) are consistently enhanced to varying degrees (up to nearly 20%) by translating online content into a familiar language. In addition, confidence ratings given by users to the reliability and accuracy of the information they find are significantly higher (with increases between 5 and 11%) when they translate websites into their preferred language with free online MT services.- Anthology ID:
- 2006.amta-papers.6
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 7th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Technical Papers
- Month:
- August 8-12
- Year:
- 2006
- Address:
- Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
- Venue:
- AMTA
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
- Note:
- Pages:
- 46–55
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2006.amta-papers.6
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Federico Gaspari. 2006. The Added Value of Free Online MT Services. In Proceedings of the 7th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Technical Papers, pages 46–55, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.
- Cite (Informal):
- The Added Value of Free Online MT Services (Gaspari, AMTA 2006)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2006.amta-papers.6.pdf