@inproceedings{dawkins-etal-2025-gender,
    title = "Gender-Neutral Machine Translation Strategies in Practice",
    author = "Dawkins, Hillary  and
      Nejadgholi, Isar  and
      Lo, Chi-Kiu",
    editor = "Hackenbuchner, Jani{\c{c}}a  and
      Bentivogli, Luisa  and
      Daems, Joke  and
      Manna, Chiara  and
      Savoldi, Beatrice  and
      Vanmassenhove, Eva",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Gender-Inclusive Translation Technologies (GITT 2025)",
    month = jun,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Geneva, Switzerland",
    publisher = "European Association for Machine Translation",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.gitt-1.5/",
    pages = "74--88",
    ISBN = "978-2-9701897-4-9",
    abstract = "Gender-inclusive machine translation (MT) should preserve gender ambiguity in the source to avoid misgendering and representational harms. While gender ambiguity often occurs naturally in notional gender languages such as English, maintaining that gender neutrality in grammatical gender languages is a challenge. Here we assess the sensitivity of 21 MT systems to the need for gender neutrality in response to gender ambiguity in three translation directions of varying difficulty. The specific gender-neutral strategies that are observed in practice are categorized and discussed. Additionally, we examine the effect of binary gender stereotypes on the use of gender-neutral translation. In general, we report a disappointing absence of gender-neutral translations in response to gender ambiguity. However, we observe a small handful of MT systems that switch to gender neutral translation using specific strategies, depending on the target language."
}