William Pepper

Usefulness and Usability of a Multilingual Electronic Meeting System

Communication in multilingual meetings is difficult, and interpersonal barriers increase with the number of languages used in the discussion. In this paper, we show how participants in pseudo-oral and electronic, multilingual meetings were able to comprehend previously prepared comments in up to five languages, but the electronic meetings took much less time. In addition, there were no significant differences between the two types of meetings in terms of ease of use or usefulness, which leads us to the conclusion that for certain sets of languages and topics, an electronic meeting with machine translation is a viable alternative to the more traditional, oral set ting.