Gender-inclusive language and machine translation: from Spanish into Italian

Antonella Bove


Abstract
Gender-inclusive language is a discursive practice that introduces the use of new forms and strategies to make women and different non-binary gender identities more visible. Spanish uses gender doublets (los niños y las niñas, los/as candidatos/as), the neomorpheme -e, and typographic signs such as @ and x. Similarly, Italian employs gender doublets (i bambini e le bambine, i/le candidati/e), the schwa (ə) as a neomorpheme, and the asterisk (*) as a typographic sign. Strategies like gender doublet and the @ sign aims at making women visible from a binary perspective; the others are intended to give visibility to non-binary gender identities as well (Escandell-Vidal 2020, Giusti 2022). Without a clear and agreed standard, inclusive translation poses a significant challenge and a great social responsibility for translation professionals. Hence, it is crucial to study and evaluate the quality of the outputs generated by machine translation systems (Kornacki & Pietrzak 2025, Pfalzgraf 2024). This paper contributes to the understanding of this phenomenon by analyzing the interaction between artificial intelligence systems and Spanish inclusive strategies in translation into Italian within an augmented translation perspective (Kornacki & Pietrzak 2025). The methodology involved three main steps: data collection, annotation, and analysis. Academic texts originally written in Spanish were gathered from which specific segments were extracted. Using segment-level analysis allowed for the creation of a more diverse corpus. In total, 20 instances were collected for each inclusive language strategy examined: fully split forms, half-split forms, the neomorpheme -e, the typographic sign @ and x. These segments were then translated using four artificial intelligence systems: two neural translation systems (DeepL and Google Translate) and two generative AI systems (ChatGPT and Gemini).
Anthology ID:
2025.gitt-1.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Gender-Inclusive Translation Technologies (GITT 2025)
Month:
June
Year:
2025
Address:
Geneva, Switzerland
Editors:
Janiça Hackenbuchner, Luisa Bentivogli, Joke Daems, Chiara Manna, Beatrice Savoldi, Eva Vanmassenhove
Venue:
GITT
SIG:
Publisher:
European Association for Machine Translation
Note:
Pages:
89–90
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.gitt-1.6/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Antonella Bove. 2025. Gender-inclusive language and machine translation: from Spanish into Italian. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Gender-Inclusive Translation Technologies (GITT 2025), pages 89–90, Geneva, Switzerland. European Association for Machine Translation.
Cite (Informal):
Gender-inclusive language and machine translation: from Spanish into Italian (Bove, GITT 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.gitt-1.6.pdf