Users’ quality expectations and their correspondence with the realistic features of translation applications

Abstract

Abstract With the accelerating pace of technological developments, translation applications have emerged as the latest trend of machine translation to serve users’ needs for various purposes such as study, work, travel, and entertainment. While the goal of every service, including translation, is to attain user satisfaction, a greater understanding of users’ expectations is essential to improve translation applications and enhance the user experience. This study aims at exploring the users’ quality expectations of translation applications and the realistic features of the applications. A qualitative research design was used to analyze 240 user expectations selected purposefully from 12 popular translation applications. The descriptions given by the developers of the 12 applications were evaluated using Ryan’s ( 1993) model to explore the correspondence between users’ expectations and realistic features of translation applications. The findings revealed a detailed list of quality service criteria and translation quality criteria as well as suggestions to improve both types of criteria. The study may have empirical and theoretical implications for translation researchers and translation application developers in the attempt to compile a comprehensive and realistic profile of translation application features and quality. The application users and human translators can also benefit from the findings.