This paper analyzes the impact of user adaptation in MT-mediated communication. It clarifies how the user adapts to machine translation and how effective the adaptation is in terms of communication when the purpose of communication is clear. The most common alterations and their effectiveness strongly depend on the translation language pairs. In the case of Japanese-to-English translation, we observed two main alterations: replacing words or phrases to offset the difference in concepts between Japanese and English and supplementing subjects to offset the difference in modes of expression between Japanese and English. Since Korean and Japanese are similar languages, Korean users exhibited similar adaptation tendencies. The adaptation performed by Japanese users when referring to the English translation was very effective in improving the quality of the English translations. However, it was not so effective for Chinese and even less effective for Korean translations.
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