Lost in Translation? Approaches to Gender Representation in Multilingual Archives (2024)

Abstract: The GLOBALISE project’s digitalisation of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) archives raises questions about representing gender and marginalised identities. This paper outlines the challenges of accurately conveying gender information in the archives, highlighting issues such as the lack of self-identified gender descriptions, low representation of marginalised groups, colonial context, and multilingualism in the collection. Machine learning (ML) and machine translation (MT) used in the digitalisation process may amplify existing biases and under-representation. To address these issues, the paper proposes a gender policy for GLOBALISE, offering guidelines and methodologies for handling gender information and increasing the visibility of marginalised identities. The policy contributes to discussions about representing gender and diversity in digital historical research, ML, and MT.

## introduction gender has been the subject of much debate and analysis across various disciplines. in historical archives, gender representation often reflects the biases and power dynamics of the societies that produced them, leading to the marginalisation or erasure of non-normative gender identities. attempting to describe various genders within historical contexts and across different languages and cultures, while beneficial, often simplifies complexities. such reductions can inadvertently perpetuate (post)colonial and state-driven narratives of visibility, thus homogenising differences in time, place, and circumstances @xcite @xcite . in parallel, the use of gender as a variable in artificial intelligence (ai) and machine learning (ml) within systems like recommender systems, information retrieval models, and machine translation is growing. however, there is a significant gap in critical analysis on how gender, especially non-binary identities, should be represented, taking into account intersectionality and the racialised nature of gender constructs @xcite . addressing gender biases is crucial both in historical archives and ai systems to avoid perpetuating existing inequalities and introducing new biases @xcite . the digitalisation @xcite ) of historical archives, combined with the application of machine learning and machine translation, presents unique challenges and implications for gender representation. this paper uses the globalise project as a case study to explore these issues. globalise aims to innovate historical research practices by creating an infrastructure that enables researchers and the public to access and explore the dutch east india company (voc) archives, offering insights into the history of colonial expansion and the societies that endured and resisted the voc's dominance. the project employs both historic and semantic contextualisation, in the form of entity recognition (er) and event @xcite , to enrich the archives with additional layers of information @xcite . while the primary focus of this paper is on the challenges of accurately representing gender in the context of ml, er, and ed tasks, the insights gained are particularly relevant for machine translation (mt) as well. the inherently colonial nature of the voc archives, combined with their complex historical context, the multilingual nature of the documents, and the absence of self-identified gender descriptions, poses significant challenges for accurately translating and representing gender across languages and cultures. misrepresenting or erasing gender diversity in the translation process can further perpetuate the marginalisation of non-normative identities and distort historical narratives. this paper thus attempts to answer the question posed in the title "lost in translation?" by grappling with the challenges of accurately translating and representing gender diversity across languages and cultures in the multilingual context of the globalise project and the voc archives. the question highlights the potential for gender identities and expressions to be misinterpreted, oversimplified, or erased when historical documents are digitised and subjected to machine learning and translation processes. we explore these challenges and propose approaches to mitigate the potential loss or misrepresentation of gender diversity in the digitalisation and translation process. the remainder of the paper is structured as follows: section 2 presents a bias statement; section 3 discusses the use of gender as an analytical variable; section 4 provides a detailed discussion on the globalise project, examining the multilingual nature of the archives, gender representation and its challenges within the voc archives, supplemented by specific examples; section 5 outlines the first steps toward a gender policy; section 6 concludes with a discussion on future work and broader implications. ## bias statement voc archives present a significant challenge for contemporary researchers seeking to uncover the histories of marginalised communities. the vast majority of the records were created by european men employed by the voc, reflecting their biases, interests, and the prevailing societal attitudes of the time @xcite . searching these records often leads to disappointment due to the violent categorisations of the past, which turned enslaved and colonised people into "nonpersons" @xcite @xcite . while the colonised population left hardly any self-produced traces, the archive is full of records about them. however, due to the current organisation and accessibility of these archives, the experiences and perspectives of marginalised groups are not only underrepresented but also frequently misrepresented and, in most cases, extremely difficult to access @xcite . taking from @xcite argument in their landmark work "sorting things out: classifications and their consequences", the research infrastructures we create have the power to shape and reinforce social categories and power dynamics. as researchers creating an infrastructure to access colonial archives, we must critically examine our own practices to uncover these marginalised histories @xcite . our approach is informed by personal experiences and academic backgrounds, which highlight the limitations and dangers of singular, totalising knowledge systems. this awareness underscores the importance of adopting pluralistic approaches that acknowledge the coexistence of diverse perspectives. we acknowledge the potential for representational harm @xcite in our work with the voc archives. marginalised groups, such as women, non-european actors, and individuals with non-binary genders, and other genders, appear only in traces within these colonial archives, often described by the colonial agents rather than represented in their own voices. this poses significant challenges in correctly attributing gender. the archives' inherent biases and the underrepresentation of these groups raise concerns that the developed information extraction models may fail to recognise them (under-representation) or attribute incorrect genders (such as stereotyping). globalise is considering translating the archives into various languages, such as indonesian languages (bahasa indonesia, javanese, sundanese), malay, sinhala, tamil, and mandarin, to facilitate increased access. however, this process also carries the risk of perpetuating harm through translation. misgendering or erasing diverse gender identities in the translated archives can further marginalise these communities and distort historical narratives. the ramifications of such harms can be farreaching, particularly for researchers and individuals from communities affected by dutch colonialism, who may be attempting to write on marginalised histories or seek traces of their ancestors within these archives. misrepresentation or erasure of their identities and experiences would perpetuate the very harms and marginalisation that these communities have and continue to endure. this section explores the potential benefits and drawbacks of using gender as a variable in the context of the globalise project and its analysis of the voc archives, through historical research, machine learning, and machine translation. ## case study: globalise globalise aims to improve access to the dutch east india company archive through the creation of research infrastructure, which will offer an annotated machine-readable version of the letters and papers received (obp) section of voc archives. 1 the obp consists of the documents that the dutch offices of the company received from its offices in its region of operation which ranged from the south african cape to japan. the globalise project team consists of two main groups: historians who collect and curate reference data related to the collection, and a team responsible for training language models for entity recognition (er) and event detection (ed). the entities identified in the archives will be linked to the curated reference data as well as existing reference vocabularies. furthermore, the annotations will be interconnected to provide additional context for future users of the globalise research infrastructure. the annotators creating the ground truth data for the er and ed models are from within the project team, ensuring a close collaboration between the historical and computational aspects of the project. this structure allows for a multidisciplinary approach to the digitalisation and enrichment of the voc archives, leveraging the expertise of historians and computational linguists to create a comprehensive and accessible research resource. by providing annotated and contextualised data, the globalise project aims to facilitate new insights into the history of the voc and its impact on the regions under its influence. ## developing a gender policy for globalise globalise aims to develop a gender policy that respectfully represents the diversity of gender identities and experiences within the voc archives. this policy will serve as a framework for addressing the challenges and limitations of working with historical sources, where gender information may be incomplete, biased, or absent. the gender policy will guide the project's approaches to data collection, annotation, analysis, and interpretation, ensuring that the resulting research infrastructure is sensitive to the complexities of gender across different historical and cultural contexts. principles of the globalise gender policy include: the remaining section outlines guidelines and strategies for handling gender-related information in the globalise project. ## conclusion, discussions, future work this paper encapsulates the central challenges we face in the globalise project in attempting to accurately representing and translating the diverse gender identities and expressions found within the multilingual voc archives. through this work, we aim to contribute to the broader discussion on the challenges of detecting gender at scale in multilingual and multicultural corpora. this paper has outlined the problems in our endeavor and proposed strategies to address them, grappling with the complex issues of navigating linguistic and cultural boundaries while striving for respectful and useful representations. these challenges are not unique to glob-alise; they apply to those working in digital humanities and those working with socially constructed data in fields like machine learning and machine translation. representing gender diversity across historical, linguistic, and cultural contexts in a culturally sensitive and computationally feasible manner is a broader issue that requires ongoing exploration and dialogue. we hope that this paper can contribute to informing and advancing these broader discussions and practices around the representation of gender diversity. as we continue to develop and refine our methods for representing gender diversity in the globalise project, we welcome input and collaboration from researchers and communities working on similar challenges in other domains. in terms of future work, the globalise project will start with the creation of the polyvocal gender vocabulary and initial attempts at gender detection in the voc archives. we plan to collaborate with area studies specialists to think about gender from the various regions once under the voc empire, ensuring that our approaches are culturally informed and sensitive to the specific historical and linguistic contexts of the archives.