Improving Multilingual Collaboration by Displaying How Non-native Speakers Use Automated Transcripts and Bilingual Dictionaries

Abstract

Conversational grounding, or establishing mutual knowledge that messages have been understood as intended, can be difficult to achieve when some conversational participants are using a non-native language. These difficulties in grounding can be challenging for native speakers to detect. In this paper, we examine the value of signaling potential grounding problems to native speakers (NS) by displaying how non-native speakers (NNS) use automated transcripts and bilingual dictionaries. We conducted a laboratory experiment in which NS and NNS of English collaborated via audio conferencing on a map navigation task. Triads of one NS guider, one NS follower, and one NNS follower performed the task using one of three awareness displays: (a) a no awareness display that showed only the automated transcripts, (b) a general awareness display that showed whether each follower was reading the automated transcripts and/or translating a word; or (c) a detailed awareness display that showed which line of the transcripts a follower was reading and/or which words he/she was translating. NS guiders and NNS followers collaborated most successfully with the detailed awareness display, while NS guiders and NS followers performed equally across conditions. Our findings suggest several ways to improve systems to support multilingual collaboration.

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