Intercultural Collaboration Experiment 2002 in Asia: Software Development Using Machine Translation

This paper reports about the Intercultural Collaboration Experiment (ICE2002), and discuss the effectiveness of machine translation for task oriented multinational teams. In ICE2002, students from China, Japan, Korea, and Malaysia developed software in collaboration over the net. In the experiment, participants communicated in their mother languages using machine translations. By analyzing communication log data, we found that, in the first place, participants repeated repairs to overcome translation errors to understand each other. Gradually, they started to hold active discussions regardless of translation qualities. We confirmed that machine translation has enormous potentialities to break language barriers in the multinational collaboration process.