In English, Machine Translation Makes You Sound Like a Man in His Middle Age

MARKETING 24/06/2020 In English, Machine Translation Makes You Sound Like a Man in His Middle Age THREE BOCCONI SCHOLARS FOUND AN ALGORITHMIC BIAS IN THE SYSTEMS OF GOOGLE, BING, AND DEEPL, WHEN TRANSLATING FROM SEVERAL EUROPEAN LANGUAGES INTO ENGLISH Imagine a child raised in a village inhabited only by middle-aged men. For the first ten years of her life, she only hears males in their 60s talking of work, books, sports, health, and money. What kind of weird language do you think she will speak when she leaves the village? Something similar happens to the most common machine translation systems, according to a new study by Dirk Hovy, an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Bocconi, and two Postdoctoral Researchers in his lab, Federico Bianchi and Tommaso Fornaciari. To train a translation system based on machine learning, you feed it with large amounts of texts and let it learn by experience.