Sparks of Fairness: Preliminary Evidence of Commercial Machine Translation as English-to-German Gender-Fair Dictionaries

Manuel Lardelli, Timm Dill, Giuseppe Attanasio, Anne Lauscher


Abstract
Bilingual dictionaries are bedrock components for several language tasks, including translation. However, dictionaries are traditionally fixed in time, thus excluding those neologisms and neo-morphemes that challenge the language’s nominal morphology. The need for a more dynamic, mutable alternative makes machine translation (MT) systems become an extremely valuable avenue. This paper investigates whether commercial MT can be used as bilingual dictionaries for gender-neutral translation. We focus on the English-to-German pair, where notional gender in the source requires gender inflection in the target. We translated 115 person-referring terms using Google Translate, Microsoft Bing, and DeepL and discovered that while each system is heavily biased towards the masculine gender, DeepL often provides gender-fair alternatives to users, especially with plurals.
Anthology ID:
2024.gitt-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Gender-Inclusive Translation Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Sheffield, United Kingdom
Editors:
Beatrice Savoldi, Janiça Hackenbuchner, Luisa Bentivogli, Joke Daems, Eva Vanmassenhove, Jasmijn Bastings
Venues:
GITT | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT)
Note:
Pages:
12–21
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.gitt-1.2
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Manuel Lardelli, Timm Dill, Giuseppe Attanasio, and Anne Lauscher. 2024. Sparks of Fairness: Preliminary Evidence of Commercial Machine Translation as English-to-German Gender-Fair Dictionaries. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Gender-Inclusive Translation Technologies, pages 12–21, Sheffield, United Kingdom. European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT).
Cite (Informal):
Sparks of Fairness: Preliminary Evidence of Commercial Machine Translation as English-to-German Gender-Fair Dictionaries (Lardelli et al., GITT-WS 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.gitt-1.2.pdf