Assessing the impact of real-time machine translation on requirements meetings: A replicated experiment

Opportunities for global software development are limited in those countries with a lack of English-speaking professionals. Machine translation technology is today available in the form of cross-language web services and can be embedded into multiuser and multilingual chats without disrupting the conversation flow. However, we still lack a thorough understanding of how real-time machine translation may affect communication in global software teams. In this paper, we present the replication of a controlled experiment that assesses the effect of real-time machine translation on multilingual teams while engaged in distributed requirements meetings. In particular, in this replication we specifically evaluate whether non- English speaking groups benefit from communicating in their own native languages when their English is not fluid enough for a fast-paced conversation.