Making Sense of Foreign Language Posts in Social Media

Abstract

Many people's social media feeds include posts in languages they do not understand. While previous research has examined bilingual social media users' language choices, little research has focused on how people make sense of foreign language posts. In the present study, we interviewed 23 undergraduate social media users about how they consume and make sense of posts in other languages. Interviewees reported that they often did not pay attention to or engage with foreign language posts, due to a lack of relevance and contextual knowledge. When they did actively engage with foreign language posts, interviewees did not rely solely on machine translation output but instead actively collected and combined various cues from within and outside the post in order to understand what it was about. Interviewees further reported different types of goals for trying to make sense of foreign language posts; some focused on simply extracting and understanding the emotional components of a post while others tried to gain a fuller understanding of a post, including its contextual and cultural meanings. Based on these findings, we suggest design possibilities that could better aid multilingual communication in social media.

The impact of translation modality on user experience: an eye-tracking study of the Microsoft Word user interface

“…The findings suggest that MT helped the Chinese participants to produce ideas in English, but both groups found the English messages that were not mediated by MT to be more comprehensible. Lim and Fussell (2017) analyse how people understand social posts in languages they do not understand. They found that users not only rely on MT to understand messages, but also on the context of the message by means of visual content (pictures and emojis), contextual and cultural cues, and background knowledge, among others.…”

“…However, target language participants did report on words that were wrong, incorrect or confusing (as per Table 1) in the MT scenario, and these terms created difficulties when completing the tasks. To overcome these difficulties, they resorted to their previous experience, checked the context, checked the visual icons, or they back-translated the term (into English), as in Lim and Fussell (2017) and Pituxcoosuvarn et al (2018).…”

How Emotional and Contextual Annotations Involve in Sensemaking Processes of Foreign Language Social Media Posts

“…Language differences pose not only the immediate barrier of understanding the other language, but the more general barrier of cultural and contextual differences [7][30] [33] because languages are often associated with specific countries or cultures. By themselves, machine translations help address the first issue but not the second, which has been found to be a key problem for people when making sense of foreign language posts in social media [24].…”

“…As it is increasingly common to encounter foreign language posts in one's feed [1][9], social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have incorporated machine translation (MT) features (e.g., [46]) into their interfaces to help users to understand and interact with posts in foreign languages. While the overall quality of MT continues to improve, recent studies [24] show that social media users still have trouble making sense of foreign language posts because MT quality is inconsistent, particularly given the colloquial nature of much social media content [4], [15]. Even when MT produces reasonable translations, these translations often do not help readers understand the cultural and contextual meanings around foreign language posts [24] [35].…”

“…While the overall quality of MT continues to improve, recent studies [24] show that social media users still have trouble making sense of foreign language posts because MT quality is inconsistent, particularly given the colloquial nature of much social media content [4], [15]. Even when MT produces reasonable translations, these translations often do not help readers understand the cultural and contextual meanings around foreign language posts [24] [35]. These difficulties and information gaps, along with the cognitive load of working with a foreign language, often make people reluctant to pay attention to foreign language posts [14] [25].…”