Foreign-language Reviews: Help or Hindrance?

Abstract

The number and quality of user reviews greatly affects consumer purchasing decisions. While reviews in all languages are increasing, it is still often the case (especially for non-English speakers) that there are only a few reviews in a person’s first language. Using an online experiment, we examine the value that potential purchasers receive from interfaces showing additional reviews in a second language. The results paint a complicated picture with both positive and negative reactions to the inclusion of foreign-language reviews. Roughly 26–28\% of subjects clicked to see translations of the foreign-language content when given the opportunity, and those who did so were more likely to select the product with foreign-language reviews than those who did not.

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The official version of the extended abstract will be in the ACM Digital Library shortly, and an identical open-access copy is freely available on arXiv now.

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Media coverage

A Third Rely on Translation to Make E-commerce Decisions–Oxford Study, Slator

Citation

Hale, S. A. and Eleta, I. (2017). Foreign-language Reviews: Help or Hindrance? In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2017, ACM.

@inproceedings{hale2017chi,
	author = {Hale, Scott A. and Eleta, Irene},
	title = {Foreign-language Reviews: Help or Hindrance?},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
	series = {CHI 2017},
	year = {2017},
	url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025575},
	doi = {10.1145/3025453.3025575},
	publisher = {ACM},
	address = {New York, NY, USA},
	keywords = {experiment; user-generated content; product reviews; e-commerce; multilingualism; bilingualism; internationalization and localization}
}

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