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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.00287 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00287/

## Key facts

- Cited by 70 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06520/) (2016)
- [Mitigating Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing: Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08976/) (2019)
- [Word Embeddings Quantify 100 Years of Gender and Ethnic Stereotypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08412/) (2017)
- [Evaluating Gender Bias in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00591/) (2019)
- [Learning Discourse-level Diversity for Neural Dialog Models using Conditional Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10960/) (2017)
- [Getting Gender Right in Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05088/) (2019)
- [Has Machine Translation Achieved Human Parity? A Case for Document-level Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07048/) (2018)
- [In Plain Sight: Media Bias Through the Lens of Factual Reporting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02670/) (2019)
- [Attaining the Unattainable? Reassessing Claims of Human Parity in Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10432/) (2018)
- [Massive Exploration of Neural Machine Translation Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03906/) (2017)
- [Lost in Translation: Loss and Decay of Linguistic Richness in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.12068/) (2019)
- [Post-editese: an Exacerbated Translationese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00900/) (2019)
- [Investigating Sports Commentator Bias within a Large Corpus of American Football Broadcasts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03343/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 70)

- [Gender Bias in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06001/) (2021)
- [Towards Leaving No Indic Language Behind: Building Monolingual Corpora, Benchmark and Models for Indic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05409/) (2022)
- [INCLUDE: Evaluating Multilingual Language Understanding with Regional Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19799/) (2024)
- [The Multilingual Alignment Prism: Aligning Global and Local Preferences to Reduce Harm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18682/) (2024)
- [Theories of "Gender" in NLP Bias Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02526/) (2022)
- [IrokoBench: A New Benchmark for African Languages in the Age of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03368/) (2024)
- [RLHF Can Speak Many Languages: Unlocking Multilingual Preference Optimization for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02552/) (2024)
- [Parameters vs. Context: Fine-Grained Control of Knowledge Reliance in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15888/) (2025)
- [Square One Bias in NLP: Towards a Multi-Dimensional Exploration of the Research Manifold](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09755/) (2022)
- [Machine Translation from Signed to Spoken Languages: State of the Art and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03086/) (2022)
- [Do Large Language Models Have an English Accent? Evaluating and Improving the Naturalness of Multilingual LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15956/) (2024)
- [Parameter-Efficient Neural Reranking for Cross-Lingual and Multilingual Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02292/) (2022)
- [Akal Badi ya Bias: An Exploratory Study of Gender Bias in Hindi Language Technology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06346/) (2024)
- [GENder-IT: An Annotated English-Italian Parallel Challenge Set for Cross-Linguistic Natural Gender Phenomena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02854/) (2021)
- [Bandits Don't Follow Rules: Balancing Multi-Facet Machine Translation with Multi-Armed Bandits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06997/) (2021)
- [What the Harm? Quantifying the Tangible Impact of Gender Bias in Machine Translation with a Human-centered Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00545/) (2024)
- [X-RiSAWOZ: High-Quality End-to-End Multilingual Dialogue Datasets and Few-shot Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17674/) (2023)
- [Do Multilingual Large Language Models Mitigate Stereotype Bias?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05740/) (2024)
- [Finding Memo: Extractive Memorization in Constrained Sequence Generation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12929/) (2022)
- [MURI: High-Quality Instruction Tuning Datasets for Low-Resource Languages via Reverse Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12958/) (2024)
- [Generating Gender Augmented Data for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05987/) (2021)
- [Fairness Definitions in Language Models Explained](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18454/) (2024)
- [Lost in Translationese? Reducing Translation Effect Using Abstract Meaning Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11501/) (2023)
- [To Diverge or Not to Diverge: A Morphosyntactic Perspective on Machine Translation vs Human Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01419/) (2024)
- [CamelEval: Advancing Culturally Aligned Arabic Language Models and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12623/) (2024)
- [The Multilingual Divide and Its Impact on Global AI Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21344/) (2025)
- [Beyond the Final Layer: Intermediate Representations for Better Multilingual Calibration in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03136/) (2025)
- [TUMLU: A Unified and Native Language Understanding Benchmark for Turkic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11020/) (2025)
- [Smoothing Entailment Graphs with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00318/) (2022)
- [Towards Bridging the Digital Language Divide](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13405/) (2023)

## 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).