Who benefits from CLIR in web retrieval?

Purpose – The aim of the current paper is to test whether query translation is beneficial in web retrieval. Design/methodology/approach – The language pairs were Finnish‐Swedish, English‐German and Finnish‐French. A total of 12‐18 participants were recruited for each language pair. Each participant performed four retrieval tasks. The author's aim was to compare the performance of the translated queries with that of the target language queries. Thus, the author asked participants to formulate a source language query and a target language query for each task. The source language queries were translated into the target language utilizing a dictionary‐based system. In English‐German, also machine translation was utilized. The author used Google as the search engine. Findings – The results differed depending on the language pair. The author concluded that the dictionary coverage had an effect on the results. On average, the results of query‐translation were better than in the traditional laboratory tests. Originality/value – This research shows that query translation in web is beneficial especially for users with moderate and non‐active language skills. This is valuable information for developers of cross‐language information retrieval systems.