Cultural Differences and Similarities in Perceptions of Artificial Social Agents Between German and Chinese Speakers

Abstract

The Artificial Social Agent(ASA) questionnaire serves as a tool to assess the interaction between humans and ASA\cite{OGQuestionnaire}. In an effort to increase the number of people who can make use of the questionnaire, previous work has been done to translate this questionnaire to Mandarin Chinese\cite{Chinese}. To increase the number of people who can use this questionnaire even more, we have translated it to German using a similar iterative translating process. We had professionals translate the questionnaire and ran 3 rounds of surveys to see what questions needed improvement. Then, there was a final survey that evaluated the German version to see how well it performs and to see how it compares to the English version. In order to evaluate the cultural differences between the Chinese and German translations, the data of both translation evaluations were compared. From these results, it was shown that ASA developers who use the German version of the ASA questionnaire can make comparisons on a construct level to the English version. This was, however, only possible when using the full questionnaire, not the short version. Additionally, we have found that there are differences in how Mandarin Chinese speakers and German speakers rate ASAs.