Communication Errors as Opportunities for Shared Understanding in Intercultural Collaboration

This paper suggests a model for intercultural communication that focuses on clarifying how the communication errors are recognized, and then repaired, by analyzing communication data collected in the Intercultural Collaboration Experiment (ICE). In ICE, participants collaborated via Bulletin Board System equipped with the machine translation mechanism. We have observed cases where communication errors ended up with shared understanding among participants though error realizations and repairs. This shows that the process of realization and repairs are one of the requirements for shared understanding.