mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Machine Translationese: Effects of Algorithmic Bias on Linguistic Complexity in Machine Translation

arXiv 2102.00287 ↗First posted 30 Jan 2021cs.CL cs.AI cs.CYcited by 70

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Abstract (arXiv)

Recent studies in the field of Machine Translation (MT) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) have shown that existing models amplify biases observed in the training data. The amplification of biases in language technology has mainly been examined with respect to specific phenomena, such as gender bias. In this work, we go beyond the study of gender in MT and investigate how bias amplification might affect language in a broader sense. We hypothesize that the 'algorithmic bias', i.e. an exacerbation of frequently observed patterns in combination with a loss of less frequent ones, not only exacerbates societal biases present in current datasets but could also lead to an artificially impoverished language: 'machine translationese'. We assess the linguistic richness (on a lexical and morphological level) of translations created by different data-driven MT paradigms - phrase-based statistical (PB-SMT) and neural MT (NMT). Our experiments show that there is a loss of lexical and morphological richness in the translations produced by all investigated MT paradigms for two language pairs (EN<=>FR and EN<=>ES).

Key facts. Cited by 70 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 19 of its 60 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 30 Jan 2021.

Builds on

19 of 60 references.

References · 19

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
  2. 2014Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimizationcited by 36,960
  3. 2014Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translatecited by 4,530
  4. 2014Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networkscited by 2,974
  5. 2015Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Unitscited by 2,898
  6. 2018A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scorescited by 1,790
  7. 2016Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddingscited by 1,304
  8. 2019Mitigating Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing: Literature Reviewcited by 287
  9. 2017Word Embeddings Quantify 100 Years of Gender and Ethnic Stereotypescited by 251
  10. 2019Evaluating Gender Bias in Machine Translationcited by 247
  11. 2017Learning Discourse-level Diversity for Neural Dialog Models using Conditional Variational Autoencoderscited by 222
  12. 2019Getting Gender Right in Neural Machine Translationcited by 98
7 more
  1. 2018Has Machine Translation Achieved Human Parity? A Case for Document-level Evaluationcited by 88
  2. 2019In Plain Sight: Media Bias Through the Lens of Factual Reportingcited by 68
  3. 2018Attaining the Unattainable? Reassessing Claims of Human Parity in Neural Machine Translationcited by 58
  4. 2017Massive Exploration of Neural Machine Translation Architecturescited by 55
  5. 2019Lost in Translation: Loss and Decay of Linguistic Richness in Machine Translationcited by 45
  6. 2019Post-editese: an Exacerbated Translationesecited by 29
  7. 2019Investigating Sports Commentator Bias within a Large Corpus of American Football Broadcastscited by 8

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 8; 2022: 8; 2023: 7; 2024: 25; 2025: 12; 2026: 10.

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  1. 2021Gender Bias in Machine Translationcited by 116
  2. 2022Towards Leaving No Indic Language Behind: Building Monolingual Corpora, Benchmark and Models for Indic Languagescited by 99
  3. 2024INCLUDE: Evaluating Multilingual Language Understanding with Regional Knowledgecited by 78
  4. 2024The Multilingual Alignment Prism: Aligning Global and Local Preferences to Reduce Harmcited by 67
  5. 2022Theories of "Gender" in NLP Bias Researchcited by 62
  6. 2024IrokoBench: A New Benchmark for African Languages in the Age of Large Language Modelscited by 43
  7. 2024RLHF Can Speak Many Languages: Unlocking Multilingual Preference Optimization for LLMscited by 42
  8. 2025Parameters vs. Context: Fine-Grained Control of Knowledge Reliance in Language Modelscited by 38
  9. 2022Square One Bias in NLP: Towards a Multi-Dimensional Exploration of the Research Manifoldcited by 29
  10. 2022Machine Translation from Signed to Spoken Languages: State of the Art and Challengescited by 20
  11. 2024Do Large Language Models Have an English Accent? Evaluating and Improving the Naturalness of Multilingual LLMscited by 19
  12. 2022Parameter-Efficient Neural Reranking for Cross-Lingual and Multilingual Retrievalcited by 17
38 more
  1. 2024Akal Badi ya Bias: An Exploratory Study of Gender Bias in Hindi Language Technologycited by 17
  2. 2021GENder-IT: An Annotated English-Italian Parallel Challenge Set for Cross-Linguistic Natural Gender Phenomenacited by 16
  3. 2021Bandits Don't Follow Rules: Balancing Multi-Facet Machine Translation with Multi-Armed Banditscited by 16
  4. 2024What the Harm? Quantifying the Tangible Impact of Gender Bias in Machine Translation with a Human-centered Studycited by 15
  5. 2024Do Multilingual Large Language Models Mitigate Stereotype Bias?cited by 13
  6. 2022Finding Memo: Extractive Memorization in Constrained Sequence Generation Taskscited by 12
  7. 2023X-RiSAWOZ: High-Quality End-to-End Multilingual Dialogue Datasets and Few-shot Agentscited by 12
  8. 2024MURI: High-Quality Instruction Tuning Datasets for Low-Resource Languages via Reverse Instructionscited by 12
  9. 2021Generating Gender Augmented Data for NLPcited by 11
  10. 2023Lost in Translationese? Reducing Translation Effect Using Abstract Meaning Representationcited by 10
  11. 2024To Diverge or Not to Diverge: A Morphosyntactic Perspective on Machine Translation vs Human Translationcited by 10
  12. 2024Fairness Definitions in Language Models Explainedcited by 10
  13. 2024CamelEval: Advancing Culturally Aligned Arabic Language Models and Benchmarkscited by 10
  14. 2025The Multilingual Divide and Its Impact on Global AI Safetycited by 10
  15. 2025Beyond the Final Layer: Intermediate Representations for Better Multilingual Calibration in Large Language Modelscited by 9
  16. 2022Smoothing Entailment Graphs with Language Modelscited by 8
  17. 2025TUMLU: A Unified and Native Language Understanding Benchmark for Turkic Languagescited by 8
  18. 2023Towards Bridging the Digital Language Dividecited by 7
  19. 2024M2Lingual: Enhancing Multilingual, Multi-Turn Instruction Alignment in Large Language Modelscited by 7
  20. 2025Are We Paying Attention to Her? Investigating Gender Disambiguation and Attention in Machine Translationcited by 7
  21. 2023On Evaluating Multilingual Compositional Generalization with Translated Datasetscited by 6
  22. 2024Whose wife is it anyway? Assessing bias against same-gender relationships in machine translationcited by 6
  23. 2024How Multilingual Are Large Language Models Fine-Tuned for Translation?cited by 6
  24. 2024SCAR: Data Selection via Style Consistency-Aware Response Ranking for Efficient Instruction-Tuning of Large Language Modelscited by 6
  25. 2024Towards Tailored Recovery of Lexical Diversity in Literary Machine Translationcited by 5
  26. 2021Automatic Classification of Human Translation and Machine Translation: A Study from the Perspective of Lexical Diversitycited by 4
  27. 2021On Systematic Style Differences between Unsupervised and Supervised MT and an Application for High-Resource Machine Translationcited by 4
  28. 2023Diversity and Language Technology: How Techno-Linguistic Bias Can Cause Epistemic Injusticecited by 4
  29. 2024Gender Bias in Machine Translation and The Era of Large Language Modelscited by 4
  30. 2025You Cannot Feed Two Birds with One Score: the Accuracy-Naturalness Tradeoff in Translationcited by 4
  31. 2025UPDESH: Synthesizing Grounded Instruction Tuning Data for 13 Indic Languagescited by 4
  32. 2023The Best of Both Worlds: Combining Human and Machine Translations for Multilingual Semantic Parsing with Active Learningcited by 3
  33. 2021Faithful Target Attribute Prediction in Neural Machine Translationcited by 2
  34. 2022Categorizing Semantic Representations for Neural Machine Translationcited by 2
  35. 2024Mitigating Translationese in Low-resource Languages: The Storyboard Approachcited by 2
  36. 2024Empowering Persian LLMs for Instruction Following: A Novel Dataset and Training Approachcited by 2
  37. 2025Decoding Machine Translationese in English-Chinese News: LLMs vs. NMTscited by 2
  38. 2021Does Summary Evaluation Survive Translation to Other Languages?cited by 1

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