Analysis on Multilingual Discussion for Wikipedia Translation

In current Wikipedia translation activities, most translation tasks are performed by bilingual speakers who have high language skills and specialized knowledge of the articles. Unfortunately, compared to the large amount of Wikipedia articles, the number of such qualified translators is very small. Thus the success of Wikipedia translation activities hinges on the contributions from non-bilingual speakers. In this paper, we report on a study investigating the effects of introducing a machine translation mediated BBS that enables monolinguals to collaboratively translate Wikipedia articles using their mother tongues. From our experiment using this system, we found out that users made high use of the system and communicated actively across different languages. Furthermore, most of such multilingual discussions seemed to be successful in transferring knowledge between different languages. Such success appeared to be made possible by a distinctive communication pattern which emerged as the users tried to avoid misunderstandings from machine translation errors. These findings suggest that there is a fair chance of non-bilingual speakers being capable of effectively contributing to Wikipedia translation activities with the assistance of machine translation.