I would be very interested in reading about people’s experiences using machine translation—either text translation or spoken interpretation—in work-related contexts.

When the participants in a back-and-forth e-mail exchange, for example, do not share a common language and one or both use translation software to communicate, are they able accomplish what they need to do reasonably well? Or does the communication break down at some point?

Can live meetings be conducted successfully when one or more active participant uses MT interpretation? Or are there too many cases of faulty voice recognition and mistranslation for the meeting to proceed comfortably?

I ask because I have been thinking and writing for several years about the implications of improved machine translation for foreign-language education. I know how accurate, and inaccurate, MT can be at the sentence-by-sentence level, especially between Japanese and English, and researchers I know are starting to study how some language learners use MT. But it’s been hard to get a handle on the extent to which the software is actually used in real-life contexts.