Title
Understanding Cross-lingual Pragmatic Misunderstandings in Email Communication
Abstract
AbstractCommunication tools such as email facilitate communication and collaboration between speakers of different languages, who use two primary strategies-English as a common language and machine translation (MT) tools-to help them overcome language barriers. However, each of these communication strategies creates its own challenges for cross-lingual communication. In this paper, we compare how people's interpretations of an email sender's social intention, and their evaluation of the email and the senders, differ when using a common language versus MT in email communication. We conducted an online experiment in which monolingual native English speakers read and rated request emails written by native English speakers, emails written by bilingual Chinese speakers in English, and emails written in Chinese then machine-translated into English. We found that participants interpreted the social intentions of the email sender less accurately for machine-translated emails than for emails written by non-native speakers in English. Participants also rated the senders and emails less positively overall for machine-translated emails compared to emails written by non-native speakers in English. Based on these findings, we suggest design possibilities that could better aid multilingual communication.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1145/3512976
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
DocType
Volume
Issue
Conference
6
CSCW1
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hajin Lim1113.46
Dan Cosley23239260.74
Susan R. Fussell32266208.15