VOSS: Supporting Multilingual Virtual Organizations

对于员工分布在世界各地的组织来说，语言选择是一个关键问题。允许每个人都说自己的母语并使用机器翻译工具是一个不完美的解决方案，因为即使是最好的工具也会犯很多错误。 然而，要求所有沟通都以标准的“公司语言”（通常是英语）进行的公司可能会将那些公司语言不是其主要语言的人排除在外，这些人可能会觉得自己是二等成员，因为他们害怕犯错并被评判他们的语言使用。该项目的目标是更好地理解和支持全球虚拟组织中的非正式沟通，这些组织的成员说不同的母语。具体而言，研究解决了三个相互关联的问题：（一）什么是非母语的经验，以英语为基础的虚拟组织？(b)与机器翻译相比，使用英语作为通用语言的好处和成本是什么？(c)如何增强机器翻译以改善沟通？ 我们通过访谈和调查、受控实验室研究以及开发和评估使用额外的意义表示（如图片）来消除机器翻译中的差距的工具来调查这些问题。了解语言选择实践中涉及的问题和权衡对于公司的竞争力和人们的工作经验都很重要，从理论上讲，通过补充现有的工作，心理学和计算机介导的沟通文化如何影响关系的建立和团队合作的虚拟组织。本研究有助于扩大非英语母语者在虚拟组织中的参与，从而增加信任和提高组织竞争力。 开发新的工具来支持现有的机器翻译方法也将帮助个人和组织进行沟通和协作，同时为语言处理，机器翻译和多语言图片检索方面的现有文献做出贡献。 该研究还涉及本科生和研究生，并将导致他们在跨学科研究的进一步培训和教育。

Language choice is a key issue for organizations whose workers are distributed across the world. Allowing everyone to speak their native language and using machine translation tools is an imperfect solution because even the best such tools make many mistakes. However, companies that require all communication to take place in a standard "corporate language" (often English) risk excluding people for whom the corporate language is not their main language, who may feel like second-class members because they fear making mistakes and being judged on their language use. The goal of this project is to better understand and support informal communication in global virtual organizations whose members speak different native languages. Specifically, the research addresses three interrelated questions: (a) What are the experiences of non-native speakers in English-based virtual organizations? (b) What are the benefits and costs of using English as a common language vs. machine translation? (c) How can machine translation be augmented to improve communication? We investigate these questions through a combination of interviews and surveys, controlled laboratory studies, and the development and evaluation of tools that use additional representations of meaning, such as pictures, to smooth gaps in machine translation.Understanding the issues and tradeoffs involved around language choice practices is important both practically, in terms of companies' competitiveness and people's experiences in the workplace, and theoretically, by complementing existing work in psychology and computer-mediated communication on how culture affects relationship-building and teamwork in virtual organizations. This research could help broaden participation of non-native English speakers in virtual organizations leading to increased trust and improved organizational competitiveness. Developing new tools to support existing machine translation approaches will also help individuals and organizations to communicate and collaborate, while contributing to the existing body of literature in language processing, machine translation, and multi-lingual picture retrieval. The research also involves undergraduate and graduate students and will result in their further training and education in interdisciplinary research.