Open Source Software Development with Your Mother Language: Intercultural Collaboration Experiment 2002

Toward the dramatic Internet diffusion in Asia-Pacific countries [1], the intercultural collaboration support system, which surpasses the sense of values and language differences, is necessary to be constructed. Differing from the face-to-face communications, to the computer-mediated communications, machine translation services can be easily applied. This technological advancement drastically increases availability of intercultural collaboration beyond the language barrier. Although natural language processing researchers have conducted rigorous research on machine translation for years ([2][3][4] etc.), the translation quality is hardly adequate to be applied to practical worksites. The preceding studies evaluate machine translation on written documents, and do not take into account “interaction factor” to refine translation quality. We, on the other hand, apply machine translation to human-to-human collaboration, and try to analyze the interactive translation refinement procedures implemented between humans and between human and machines.