About Fairslator

We need to talk about bias in machine translation. Translations produced by machines are often biased because of ambiguities in gender, number and forms of address. For example, when translating from English into French, should student be translated as male étudiant or female étudiante? Should you be translated as informal tu or formal vous? Machines often resolve these ambiguities badly and with bias because they don’t know what the user meant.

Fairslator is an experimental application which removes many such biases. Fairslator works by examining the output of machine translation, detecting when bias has occurred, and correcting it by asking follow-up questions such as Do you mean male student or female student? Are you addressing the person casually or politely? Fairslator is a human-in-the-loop translator, built on the idea that you shouldn’t guess if you can ask.

Who is behind Fairslator?

My name is Michal Měchura. I am a freelance language technologist. I started Fairslator because I was frustrated with how badly machine translators handle ambiguous input. No matter how smart the AI gets, some ambiguities will always be unresolvable because there are no clues in the input text. The only way to resolve them is to ask the user to disambiguate. Fairslator is where I’m tinkering with algorithms and UX for doing exactly that.

What next?

Read more about bias and ambiguity in machine translation.

We need to talk about bias
in machine translation

The Fairslator whitepaper

Version 1.0

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Faislator blog

Fairslator timeline

coming up October 2024 — We will be talking about bias in machine translation at a Translating Europe Workshop organised by the European Commission in Prague as part of Jeronýmovy dny, a series of public lectures and seminars on translation and interpreting.

September 2024 — We are presenting a half-day tutorial on bias in machine translation at this year's biennial conference of AMTA, the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.

December 2023 — Fairslator presented a workshop on bias in machine translation at the European Commission's Directorate-General for Translation, attended by translation-related staff from all EU institutions.

November 2023 — Fairslator went to Translating and the Computer, an annual conference on translation technology in Luxembourg, to present its brand new API.

November 2023 — We were talking about gender bias, gender rewriting and Fairslator at the EAFT Summit in Barcelona where we also launched an exciting spin-off project there: Genderbase, a multilingual database of gender-sensitive terminology.

November 2023 — English–French language pair added to the Fairslator API.

July 2023 — The Fairslator API was launched. Explore the API or read the announcent: Introducing the Fairslator API »

February 2023 — We spoke to machinetranslation.com about bias in machine translation, about Fairslator, and about our vision for “human-assisted machine translation”. Read the interview here: Creating an Inclusive AI Future: The Importance of Non-Binary Representation »

October 2022 — We presented Fairslator at the Translating and the Computer (TC44) conference, Europe's main annual event for computer-aided translation, in Luxembourg. Proceedings from this conference are here, the paper that describes Fairslator starts on page 90. Read our impressions from TC44 in this thread on Twitter and Mastodon.

September 2022 — In her article Error sources in machine translation: How the algorithm reproduces unwanted gender roles (German: Fehlerquellen der maschinellen Übersetzung: Wie der Algorithmus ungewollte Rollenbilder reproduziert), Jasmin Nesbigall of oneword GmbH talks about bias in machine translation and recommends Fairslator as a step towards more gender fairness.

September 2022 — Fairslator was presented at the Text, Speech and Dialogue (TSD) conference in Brno.

August 2022 — Translations in London are talking about Fairslator in their blog post Overcoming gender bias in MT. They think the technology behind Fairslator could be useful in the translation industry for faster post-editing of machine-translated texts.

August 2022 — A fourth language pair released: English → French.

July 2022 — We presented a paper titled A Taxonomy of Bias-Causing Ambiguities in Machine Translation at a Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing during the 2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Seattle.

July 2022 — Germany's Goethe-Institut interviewed us for the website of their project Artificially Correct. Read the interview in German: Wenn die Maschine den Menschen fragt or in English: When the machine asks the human, or see this short video on Twitter.

May 2022 — Slator.com, a website for the translation industry, asked us for a guest post and of course we didn't say no. Read What You Need to Know About Bias in Machine Translation »

April 2022 — A third language pair added: English → Irish.

February 2022 — Fairslator launched with two language pairs: English → German, English → Czech.