Does this sound like a stereotype? That’s because it is. And it is the question that opens this video by Dr. Eva Vanmassenhove of the University of the Netherlands on the topic of gender bias in machine translation.
Eva begins by pulling up a screenshot of a Google Translate result from Hungarian to English. Unlike English, Hungarian is a language that doesn’t have gendered pronouns.
The result is startling: “Someone beautiful is female, someone clever, male. A woman should do the dishes, while a man builds. A woman cleans, cooks, raises children, and a man does research, teaches, and makes money.”
These results show the extent to which gender biases are latvia mobile database present in machine translation. But what exactly is gender bias, and why is it such a pervasive problem? The video is a well-detailed and highly informative introduction to the topic, and well worth the watch.
A few questions for Dr. Vanmassenhove
Gender bias is mainly visible in MT when you are translating between languages where the one language doesn't require you to make the gender explicit while the other one does. For instance, English is a language where there are barely any gender markers (except for referential "he", "she"...). When translating sentences such as "I'm beautiful" or "I'm a nurse" into other languages (e. French, Spanish, Russian) the MT system will pick a gender for you and this will often result in biased translations.