Lessons Learned from Multilingual Collaboration in Global Virtual Teams

The scale of developments in global virtual teams, which consist of the members around the world to cooperate for a specific purpose, is increasing in the growing network environments. In this paper, we discuss the facilities required for the tools supporting collaboration in virtual teams, which includes problems on the language and physical distribution of members. We have developed a communication tool and a document sharing tool with multilingual and distribution features, and then have observed the problem with using multilingual collaboration support system from an intercultural cooperative software development experiment. The observations show that multilingual environment with translation facility may be appropriate for the overall and abstract discussions but may not be appropriate for the detailed discussions in cooperative works.