How gender rewriting works in machine translation
This is how Fairslator deals with gender-biased translations.
Michal Měchura2023-07-10
Gender rewriting is a simple technology for removing gender bias from machine translation. It works by taking a gender-biased translation and rewording it into a different gender (or into a gender-neutral form). Here’s a handy series of infographics I tossed up recently to explain, in three easy steps, how Fairslator does this.
It begins with a gender-biased translation
In this example we have an English sentence which has been machine-translated into German. The source text contains the word lawyer which has been translated into German as Anwalt. Anwalt is the masculine word for lawyer, which means that the translation is biased in favour of the male reading of lawyer. What should we do if the lawyer we are talking about is actually a woman? We ask Fairslator to rewrite the translation from male to female, of course!
Step 1: Change the noun
The first step is to change the masculine word Anwalt to the feminine word Anwältin. Fairslator looks the word up in its database of gender-paired nouns. Most such words are occupation terms, like in this example.
Step 2: Change the neighbouring words
The next step is to look around the word we have just changed and see if any other words need to be changed on its account. Fairslator reinflects any dependent adjectives and determiners to keep them in grammatical agreement with the changed noun.
Step 3: Change any co-referring pronouns
We’re almost done, but before we finish up, let’s look through the rest of the text. Are there any words elsewhere in the sentence that refer to the changed noun and need to be reinflected too? In this example we have one such word, a relative pronoun.
Voilà, here is the result!
Finally, we copy all remaining words unchanged, and here is our rewritten sentence which is now using the female word for lawyer.
Gender rewriting is something you can easily do manually if you speak the language. But if you don’t, or if you want to spare yourself the trouble, Fairslator can do it for you at the click of a button: try the web-based demo and checkout the API.
