Participatory Research as a Path to Community-Informed, Gender-Fair Machine Translation

Author(s)

Dagmar Gromann, Manuel Lardelli, Katta Spiel, Sabrina Burtscher, Lukas Daniel Klausner, Arthur Mettinger, Igor Miladinovic, Sigrid Schefer-Wenzl, Daniela Duh, Katharina Bühn

Abstract

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.

Organisation(s)

Department for Translation Studies, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Human Resources and Gender Equality, Department of English and American Studies

Journal

Proceedings of the First Workshop on Gender-Inclusive Translation Technologies

Publication date

06-2023

Peer reviewed

Yes

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

602011 Computational linguistics, 504014 Gender studies

Keywords

Portal url

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/56766510-fb58-412f-bd3b-1ab9ca357b69