# What about em? How Commercial Machine Translation Fails to Handle (Neo-)Pronouns

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.16051 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16051/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06520/) (2016)
- [Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14050/) (2020)
- [Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution: Evaluation and Debiasing Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06876/) (2018)
- [Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09301/) (2018)
- [Lipstick on a Pig: Debiasing Methods Cover up Systematic Gender Biases in Word Embeddings But do not Remove Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03862/) (2019)
- [Evaluating Gender Bias in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00591/) (2019)
- [RedditBias: A Real-World Resource for Bias Evaluation and Debiasing of Conversational Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03521/) (2021)
- [MultiVerS: Improving scientific claim verification with weak supervision and full-document context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01640/) (2021)
- [Harms of Gender Exclusivity and Challenges in Non-Binary Representation in Language Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12084/) (2021)
- [Gender Bias in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06001/) (2021)
- [Reducing Gender Bias in Neural Machine Translation as a Domain Adaptation Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04498/) (2020)
- [Toward Gender-Inclusive Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13913/) (2019)
- [Equalizing Gender Biases in Neural Machine Translation with Word Embeddings Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03116/) (2019)
- [Collecting a Large-Scale Gender Bias Dataset for Coreference Resolution and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03858/) (2021)
- [On Measuring Gender Bias in Translation of Gender-neutral Pronouns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11684/) (2019)
- [Perturbation Augmentation for Fairer NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12586/) (2022)
- [Welcome to the Modern World of Pronouns: Identity-Inclusive Natural Language Processing beyond Gender](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11923/) (2022)
- [Mitigating Gender Bias in Machine Translation with Target Gender Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06203/) (2020)
- [Neural Machine Translation Doesn't Translate Gender Coreference Right Unless You Make It](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05332/) (2020)
- [A General Framework for Implicit and Explicit Debiasing of Distributional Word Vector Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06092/) (2019)
- [Choose Your Lenses: Flaws in Gender Bias Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11471/) (2022)
- [Automatically Identifying Gender Issues in Machine Translation using Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14065/) (2020)
- [Gender Bias Amplification During Speed-Quality Optimization in Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00169/) (2021)
- [Consistency is Key: Disentangling Label Variation in Natural Language Processing with Intra-Annotator Agreement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10684/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Gender Bias in Hindi-English Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08680/) (2021)
- [Fair and Argumentative Language Modeling for Computational Argumentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04026/) (2022)
- [GENder-IT: An Annotated English-Italian Parallel Challenge Set for Cross-Linguistic Natural Gender Phenomena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02854/) (2021)
- [How Conservative are Language Models? Adapting to the Introduction of Gender-Neutral Pronouns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10281/) (2022)
- [Examining Covert Gender Bias: A Case Study in Turkish and English Machine Translation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10379/) (2021)
- [Extending Challenge Sets to Uncover Gender Bias in Machine Translation: Impact of Stereotypical Verbs and Adjectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11584/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Holmes: A Benchmark to Assess the Linguistic Competence of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18923/) (2024)
- [Hi Guys or Hi Folks? Benchmarking Gender-Neutral Machine Translation with the GeNTE Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05294/) (2023)
- [A Tale of Pronouns: Interpretability Informs Gender Bias Mitigation for Fairer Instruction-Tuned Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12127/) (2023)
- [Robust Pronoun Fidelity with English LLMs: Are they Reasoning, Repeating, or Just Biased?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03134/) (2024)
- [Multilingual Text-to-Image Generation Magnifies Gender Stereotypes and Prompt Engineering May Not Help You](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16092/) (2024)
- [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)
- [A Prompt Response to the Demand for Automatic Gender-Neutral Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06041/) (2024)
- [Watching the Watchers: Exposing Gender Disparities in Machine Translation Quality Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10995/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Gender-Inclusive Machine Translation with Neomorphemes and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08477/) (2024)
- [Test Suites Task: Evaluation of Gender Fairness in MT with MuST-SHE and INES](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19345/) (2023)
- [MiTTenS: A Dataset for Evaluating Gender Mistranslation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06935/) (2024)
- [Do language models practice what they preach? Examining language ideologies about gendered language reform encoded in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13852/) (2024)
- [The Lou Dataset -- Exploring the Impact of Gender-Fair Language in German Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17929/) (2024)
- [Gender-Neutral Machine Translation Strategies in Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15676/) (2025)
- [Transforming Dutch: Debiasing Dutch Coreference Resolution Systems for Non-binary Pronouns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00134/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty Quantification for Evaluating Machine Translation Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18338/) (2025)
- [WMT24 Test Suite: Gender Resolution in Speaker-Listener Dialogue Roles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06194/) (2024)
- [Tell Me What You Know About Sexism: Expert-LLM Interaction Strategies and Co-Created Definitions for Zero-Shot Sexism Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15392/) (2025)
- [GRUFF: LLM Pronoun Fidelity, Reasoning, and Biases in German](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30214/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As 3rd-person pronoun usage shifts to include novel forms, e.g., neopronouns, we need more research on identity-inclusive NLP. Exclusion is particularly harmful in one of the most popular NLP applications, machine translation (MT). Wrong pronoun translations can discriminate against marginalized groups, e.g., non-binary individuals (Dev et al., 2021). In this ``reality check'', we study how three commercial MT systems translate 3rd-person pronouns. Concretely, we compare the translations of gendered vs. gender-neutral pronouns from English to five other languages (Danish, Farsi, French, German, Italian), and vice versa, from Danish to English. Our error analysis shows that the presence of a gender-neutral pronoun often leads to grammatical and semantic translation errors. Similarly, gender neutrality is often not preserved. By surveying the opinions of affected native speakers from diverse languages, we provide recommendations to address the issue in future MT research.