Influence of detecting inaccurate messages in real-time remote text-based communication via machine translation

In multilingual communication using machine translation, translation correction based on back translation plays an important role. If users are unable to identify inaccurate translations, they will not attempt to correct them. This is an important issue because a considerable proportion of inaccurate machine translations go undetected, which prevents smooth communication. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a method for preventing users from transmitting inaccurate messages. This method can ensure that only accurate messages are exchanged between users. However, some problems may occur with the use of this method, because it rejects the user's judgment. It is important to verify the effectiveness of this method. We propose a method that reduces the transmission of inaccurate messages. If the method identifies a message as inaccurate, the chat server does not send the message to the receiver; it will instead encourage the sender to correct the message. We verified the effectiveness of the proposed method in chat communication using the Wizard of Oz method. The following conclusions were drawn from experimental results: (1) The chat communication progressed even when a user occasionally sent an inaccurate message. However, inaccurate messages did disrupt communication to some extent. When the proposed method was applied, users were able to communicate with each other more accurately. We observed that there were no significant differences in the effectiveness of communication with or without the proposed method. This suggests that our method is best applied to communication situations that require high degrees of accuracy. (2) The use of the proposed method caused users some discomfort because it rejected their judgment; thus, they did not know how to repair the messages. Based on this, it would seem that it is not easy to apply the proposed method to chat communication.