Machine Translation, Crisis, Comprehension, Trust, Flood
We conducted a survey to understand the impact of machine translation and post- editing awareness on comprehension of and trust in messages disseminated to prepare the public for a weather-related crisis, i.e. flooding. The translation direc- tion was English–Italian. Sixty-one par- ticipants—all native Italian speakers with different English proficiency levels— answered our survey. Each participant read and evaluated between three and six crisis messages using ratings and open- ended questions on comprehensibility and trust. The messages were in English and Italian. All the Italian messages had been machine translated and post-edited. Nevertheless, participants were told that only half had been post-edited, so that we could test the impact of post-editing awareness. We could not draw firm con- clusions when comparing the scores for trust and comprehensibility assigned to the three types of messages—English, post-edits, and purported raw outputs. However, when scores were triangulated with open-ended answers, stronger pat- terns were observed, such as the impact of fluency of the translations on their comprehensibility and trustworthiness. We found correlations between compre- hensibility and trustworthiness, and iden- tified other factors influencing these as- pects, such as the clarity and soundness of the messages. We conclude by outlining implications for crisis preparedness.