Mahesh Vanjani

Previous studies of multilingual electronic meetings have shown that members often comprehend the automatic translations, but accuracy is affected by errors in the source comments. However, no study has investigated to what extent these text errors reduce understanding. An experiment with six groups of students showed that participants were able to comprehend translations from German to English, even when the source text contained 5% word errors, but translations from source comments with no errors were understood better. Further, the differences in comprehension affected students’ perceptions of the system’s ease of use and usefulness.

Until fairly recently, translation among a large variety of natural languages has been difficult and costly. Now, several free, Web-based machine translation (MT) services can provide support, but relatively little research has been conducted on their accuracies. A study of four of these services using German-to-English and Spanish-to-English translations showed that Google Translate appeared to be superior. Further study using this system alone showed that while translations were not always perfect, their understandability was quite high.

Many meetings involve large groups exchanging oral comments in a face-to-face environment, yet few studies have investigated how electronic facilitation can benefit these discussions. In this paper, we studied two large oral meetings (group sizes of 38 and 37) and two computer-based meetings (group sizes 33 and 35). Results show that, as in smaller groups, members of electronic meetings experience less production blocking and evaluation apprehension and generate more total comments, relevant comments, and words per comment. However, contradicting prior research, participants in the oral meetings were more satisfied with the process.

This paper presents an overview of the impact of the dot.com boom and bust on the enrollment of students in information technology related business school programs at seven US colleges and universities during the period 1995-2006. Also, this paper presents the results of a related survey of factors affecting undergraduate business students’ choice of major at two southern US universities.