Online Machine Translation Services and Real Users' Needs: an Empirical Usability Evaluation

This paper presents an empirical evaluation of the main usability factors that play a significant role in the interaction with on-line Machine Translation (MT) services. The investigation is carried out from the point of view of typical users with an emphasis on their real needs, and focuses on a set of key usability criteria that have an impact on the successful deployment of Internet-based MT technology. A small-scale evaluation of the performance of five popular web-based MT systems against the selected usability criteria shows that different approaches to interaction design can dramatically affect the level of user satisfaction. There are strong indications that the results of this study can be fed back into the development of on-line MT services to enhance their design, thus ensuring that they meet the requirements and expectations of a wide range of Internet users.