User Adaptation in MT-mediated Communication

Abstract This paper analyzes the impact of user adaptation in MT-mediated communica-tion. It clarifies how the user adapts to machine translation and how effective the adaptation is in terms of communication when the purpose of communication is clear. The most common alterations and their effectiveness strongly depend on the translation language pairs. In the case of Japanese-to-English translation, we ob-served two main alterations: replacing words or phrases to offset the difference in concepts between Japanese and English and supplementing subjects to offset the difference in modes of expression be-tween Japanese and English. Since Ko-rean and Japanese are similar languages, Korean users exhibited similar adaptation tendencies. The adaptation performed by Japanese users when referring to the Eng-lish translation was very effective in im-proving the quality of the English translations. However, it was not so effec-tive for Chinese and even less effective for Korean translations. 1 Introduction