Supporting a Children's Workshop with Machine Translation

Previous studies have investigated the characteristics of machine translation(MT)-mediated communication in lab settings and suggested various ways to improve it [1]. Unfortunately, we still lack an understanding of how MT is used in real-world settings, particularly when people use it to support face-to-face communication. In this paper, we report on a field study of a multilingual workshop where children from various language regions used MT to communicate with each other. We investigate how children use various information such as non-verbal cues and drawings to compensate for the mistranslations of MT. For example, children tried to understand the mistranslated messages by reading alternative translations and used web browsers to search for pictures of unknown objects. Such findings provide insights for designing future multilingual support systems.