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.

The translation of gender-neutral person-referring terms (e.g.,the students) is often non-trivial.Translating from English into German poses an interesting case—in German, person-referring nouns are usually gender-specific, and if the gender of the referent(s) is unknown or diverse, the generic masculine (die Studenten (m.)) is commonly used. This solution, however, reduces the visibility of other genders, such as women and non-binary people. To counteract gender discrimination, a societal movement towards using gender-fair language exists (e.g., by adopting neosystems). However, gender-fair German is currently barely supported in machine translation (MT), requiring post-editing or manual translations. We address this research gap by studying gender-fair language in English-to-German MT. Concretely, we enrich a community-created gender-fair language dictionary and sample multi-sentence test instances from encyclopedic text and parliamentary speeches.Using these novel resources, we conduct the first benchmark study involving two commercial systems and six neural MT models for translating words in isolation and natural contexts across two domains. Our findings show that most systems produce mainly masculine forms and rarely gender-neutral variants, highlighting the need for future research. We release code and data at https://github.com/g8a9/building-bridges-gender-fair-german-mt.

Research on gender bias in Machine Translation (MT) predominantly focuses on binary gender or few languages. In this project, we investigate the ability of commercial MT systems and neural models to translate using gender-fair language (GFL) from English into German. We enrich a community-created GFL dictionary, and sample multi-sentence test instances from encyclopedic text and parliamentary speeches. We translate our resources with different MT systems and open-weights models. We also plan to post-edit biased outputs with professionals and share them publicly. The outcome will constitute a new resource for automatic evaluation and modeling gender-fair EN-DE MT.

Machine Translation (MT) models are well-known to suffer from gender bias, especially for gender beyond a binary conception. Due to the multiplicity of language-specific strategies for gender representation beyond the binary, debiasing MT is extremely challenging. As an alternative, we propose a case study on gender-fair post-editing. In this study, six professional translators each post-edited three English to German machine translations. For each translation, participants were instructed to use a different gender-fair language strategy, that is, gender-neutral rewording, gender-inclusive characters, and a neosystem. The focus of this study is not on translation quality but rather on the ease of integrating gender-fair language into the post-editing process. Findings from non-participant observation and interviews show clear differences in temporal and cognitive effort between participants and strategy as well as in the success of using gender-fair language.

With an increasing visibility of non-binary individuals, a growing number of language-specific strategies to linguistically include all genders or neutralize any gender references can be observed. Due to this multiplicity of proposed strategies and gender-specific grammatical differences across languages, selecting the one option to translate gender-fair language is challenging for machines and humans alike. As a first step towards gender-fair translation, we conducted a survey with translators to compare four gender-fair translations from a notional gender language, English, to a grammatical gender language, German. Proposed translations were rated by means of best-worst scaling as well as regarding their readability and comprehensibility. Participants expressed a clear preference for strategies with gender-inclusive character, i.e., colon.

Recent years have seen a strongly increased visibility of non-binary people in public discourse. Accordingly, considerations of gender-fair language go beyond a binary conception of male/female. However, language technology, especially machine translation (MT), still suffers from binary gender bias. Proposing a solution for gender-fair MT beyond the binary from a purely technological perspective might fall short to accommodate different target user groups and in the worst case might lead to misgendering. To address this challenge, we propose a method and case study building on participatory action research to include experiential experts, i.e., queer and non-binary people, translators, and MT experts, in the MT design process. The case study focuses on German, where central findings are the importance of context dependency to avoid identity invalidation and a desire for customizable MT solutions.