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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