IWIC 2007: Intercultural Collaboration pp 276-290 | Cite as

Adoption of Translation Support Technologies in a Multilingual Work Environment

  • Jahna Otterbacher
Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 4568)

Abstract

We study the adoption of translation support technologies by professors at a multilingual university, using the framework of the Technology Adoption Model (TAM). TAM states that a user’s perceived usefulness and ease of use for the technology ultimately determines her actual use of it. Through a survey and a set of interviews with our subjects, we find that there is evidence for TAM in the context of translation support tools. However, we also find that user adoption of these tools is a bit more complicated. Users who are able to successfully employ these tools have not only developed strategies to overcome their inaccuracies (e.g. by post-editing machine translated text), they also often compensate for the weaknesses of a given technology by combining the use of multiple tools.

Keywords

Technology Acceptance Machine Translation Electronic Dictionaries Multilingual Environments 
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007

Authors and Affiliations

  • Jahna Otterbacher
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of Public and Business Administration, University of Cyprus, P.O. Box 20537, CY-1678 NicosiaCyprus

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