# Gender-specific Machine Translation with Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.03175 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03175/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06520/) (2016)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [RealToxicityPrompts: Evaluating Neural Toxic Degeneration in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11462/) (2020)
- [BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04696/) (2020)
- [COMET: A Neural Framework for MT Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09025/) (2020)
- [Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14050/) (2020)
- [A Survey on In-context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00234/) (2022)
- [Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution: Evaluation and Debiasing Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06876/) (2018)
- [The FLORES-101 Evaluation Benchmark for Low-Resource and Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03193/) (2021)
- [Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09301/) (2018)
- [Larger language models do in-context learning differently](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03846/) (2023)
- [How Good Are GPT Models at Machine Translation? A Comprehensive Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09210/) (2023)
- [Prompting Large Language Model for Machine Translation: A Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07069/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Gender Bias in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00591/) (2019)
- [On Second Thought, Let's Not Think Step by Step! Bias and Toxicity in Zero-Shot Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08061/) (2022)
- [Is ChatGPT A Good Translator? Yes With GPT-4 As The Engine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08745/) (2023)
- [In-context Examples Selection for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02437/) (2022)
- ["I'm sorry to hear that": Finding New Biases in Language Models with a Holistic Descriptor Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09209/) (2022)
- [Multilingual Machine Translation with Large Language Models: Empirical Results and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04675/) (2023)
- [Hallucinations in Large Multilingual Translation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16104/) (2023)
- [Assessing Gender Bias in Machine Translation -- A Case Study with Google Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02208/) (2018)
- [The unreasonable effectiveness of few-shot learning for machine translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01398/) (2023)
- [Reducing Gender Bias in Neural Machine Translation as a Domain Adaptation Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04498/) (2020)
- [Multilingual LLMs are Better Cross-lingual In-context Learners with Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05940/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Bridging the Linguistic Divide: A Survey on Leveraging Large Language Models for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01919/) (2025)
- [When the Gold Standard Isn't Necessarily Standard: Challenges of Evaluating the Translation of User-Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17738/) (2025)
- [Mitigating Gender Bias in English to Romanian Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08606/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While machine translation (MT) systems have seen significant improvements, it is still common for translations to reflect societal biases, such as gender bias. Decoder-only Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in MT, albeit with performance slightly lagging behind traditional encoder-decoder Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems. However, LLMs offer a unique advantage: the ability to control the properties of the output through prompts. In this study, we leverage this flexibility to explore LLaMa's capability to produce gender-specific translations. Our results indicate that LLaMa can generate gender-specific translations with translation accuracy and gender bias comparable to NLLB, a state-of-the-art multilingual NMT system. Furthermore, our experiments reveal that LLaMa's gender-specific translations rely on coreference resolution to determine gender, showing higher gender variance in gender-ambiguous datasets but maintaining consistency in less ambiguous contexts. This research investigates the potential and challenges of using LLMs for gender-specific translations as an instance of the controllability of outputs offered by LLMs.