Business Cooperation

2020.06.30.

Inspira Group, a research company, according to their “data for social good” principle, made it possible for Anna Farkas, a BA student in sociology, to add questions to their online omnibus research, free of charge. The paper, supervised by Renáta Németh, is a case study that investigates gender bias in Google Translate and its translations of occupations from Hungarian (a gender-neutral language) to English (a gender-based language) (the thesis can be accessed on this link). Using quantitative methods, the study aims to measure the extent of gender bias in machine translations. It examines the use of pronouns in the English translation of sentences such as “ő egy orvos” (“he/she is a doctor”). To measure the bias in the algorithm, the study compares Google Translate’s translations to the proportion of men and women in each occupation, and to society’s perception of those occupations. To assess whether people find those occupations feminine or masculine, we used a survey. Inspira assisted in this research: as part of their online omnibus research, they carried out the survey on a representative sample about the perceptions of occupations using questions provided by the Anna Farkas. The study found that Google Translate mirrors people’s perception of occupations to a greater extent than the proportion of men and women in those occupations.