Assisting Users in a Cross-cultural Communication by Providing Culturally Contextualized Translations

摘要

In this paper, we present a web-chat application called Culture-to-Chat (C2C). The purpose of this chat is to help users to produce messages in a English as a Second Language - ESL. Regarding this task, C2C has two resources that we named Cultural Translator and Machine Translator. The Cultural Translator uses a Brazilian Portuguese cultural knowledge base (from the Open Mind Common Sense - Br Project in collaboration to Media Lab - MIT) that works with the sender's vocabulary expression in order to provide alternative suggestions that can have the same colloquial meaning. The Machine Translation converts texts from a source language to a target language. The process that we used to combine these features and develop the application was based on an user-centered design approach with a focus on prototyping. We used different types of fidelity-levels (low, mid, high) before developing the functional web prototype version of C2C. User tests were then applied to evaluate usability issues. After collecting data from questionnaires and observation, problems were corrected and now we are heading to a larger user study regarding the C2C functionality. We have been performing a study case involving Brazilian and Canadian users. There are some initial results available from this study that will be discussed further. These data show that users appreciate the resources that help them design messages for cross-cultural communication.