Integrating Machine Translation with Group Support Systems

In the largest face-to-face, multilingual, electronic meeting to date, 40 students exchanged sentences in 40 different languages using a new group support system called Polyglot that provides automatic translations with Google Translate. Approximately 83% of the text was understood when translated to English, as well as 90% of the comments in six meetings using German, Spanish, French, and Italian. Finally, a ranking of accuracies using sentences from 40 languages translated to English reveals that speakers from many Western European countries can probably understand each other in multilingual meetings using the group support system.