Breaking the language barriers? Machine translation technology and analysts’ forecasts for firms with foreign operations

• Main Authors: FANG, Bingxu, LIN, Pengkai
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2025
• Subjects: Language Barriers; Technology; Sell-Side Analysts; Machine Translation; Complementary Role; Accounting; Finance and Financial Management
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soa_research/2070; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soa_research/article/3097/viewcontent/ssrn_4787265.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

We study the impact of machine translation technology on analysts’ forecasts for firms with foreign operations. Exploiting the staggered rollout of Google Translate’s support for translating foreign languages into English, we find that U.S. analysts improve their forecast accuracy for firms with sub...