Beyond Accuracy: Community Perspectives on Machine Translation

Yujun Wang, Ehud Reiter, Shimei Pan, Steffen Eger, Wei Zhao


Abstract
Despite remarkable progress in machine translation (MT), non-AI communities have raised growing concerns about MT systems, suggesting a noticeable gap between technical advancement and the needs of real-world users. For instance, while NLP researchers focus on benchmark performance, end users care about ethical concerns, trust, reliability, costs, and more. We argue that listening to various user communities is essential so that research efforts would be directed towards the problems that the communities care about. To this end, we present a large-scale analysis, for the first time, that investigates what four stakeholder communities (AI developers, professional translators, language learners, and language service providers) post about MT technology on social media. To do so, we construct a dataset of 79,286 posts and comments from Reddit, Facebook, Bluesky, and Mastodon from 2019 to 2025, and analyse where these communities disagree, and how and why. Overall, we find that communities often disagree, and even show strong conflicts due to polarised sentiments on topics such as translation quality, efficiency, and reliability. This is because these communities approach these topics differently: the AI community frames them as technical and computational problems, while non-AI (user) communities care more about quality nuances, time savings, user trust, and broader social issues.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.747
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
17302–17319
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.747/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yujun Wang, Ehud Reiter, Shimei Pan, Steffen Eger, and Wei Zhao. 2026. Beyond Accuracy: Community Perspectives on Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 17302–17319, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Beyond Accuracy: Community Perspectives on Machine Translation (Wang et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.747.pdf