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并不是一个完美的解决方案，因为即使是最好的这样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，可能会将公司语言不是其主要语言的人排除在外，这些人可能会因为害怕犯错和受到语言使用的评判而感觉自己是二等成员。该项目的目标是更好地理解和支持成员使用不同母语的全球虚拟组织中的非正式交流。具体地说，这项研究涉及三个相互关联的问题：(A)非母语人士在以英语为基础的虚拟组织中的经历是什么？(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)如何加强机器翻译以改善交流？我们通过访谈和调查、对照实验室研究以及开发和评估工具来研究这些问题，这些工具使用额外的含义表征，如图片，以填补机器翻译中的空白。了解围绕语言选择实践所涉及的问题和权衡在实践中具有重要意义，无论是从公司的竞争力和人们在工作场所的经验来看，还是通过补充心理学和计算机沟通方面的现有工作，即文化如何影响虚拟组织中的关系建立和团队合作，在理论上都是重要的。这项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。开发支持现有机器翻译方法的新工具还将帮助个人和组织进行沟通和合作，同时促进语言处理、机器翻译和多语言图片检索方面的现有文献。这项研究还涉及本科生和研究生，并将导致他们在跨学科研究方面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.