# Does Machine Translation Retain Media Bias?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19945 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19945/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [xCOMET: Transparent Machine Translation Evaluation through Fine-grained Error Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10482/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Gender Bias in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00591/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Computational Propaganda Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08024/) (2020)
- [Neural Media Bias Detection Using Distant Supervision With BABE -- Bias Annotations By Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14557/) (2022)
- [NeuS: Neutral Multi-News Summarization for Mitigating Framing Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04902/) (2022)
- [Introducing MBIB -- the first Media Bias Identification Benchmark Task and Dataset Collection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13148/) (2023)
- [BgGPT 1.0: Extending English-centric LLMs to other languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10893/) (2024)
- [Experiments in News Bias Detection with Pre-Trained Neural Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09938/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Within the most recent two decades, machine translation (MT) has been advanced from a research area to a mature, deployed technology for prose text and most language pairs. However, language has different dimensions of meaning, and the alluded progress has primarily been demonstrated for propositional meaning. In this small exploratory study, we investigate whether one type of affective meaning, namely different types of linguistically expressed media bias, are retained under automatic translation for two language pairs, English and German as the source languages, and Bulgarian as the target language. We evaluate four state-of-the-art translation methods to answer the question whether and to what degree a loss of non-neutral language (specifically, 27 types of media bias) can occur as a result of applying MT. Our empirical findings are consistent with the claim that MT does not fully retain existing news bias of its input source text, but also may add extra bias of its own. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first experimental study of MT media bias retention.