Participatory Research as a Path to Community-Informed, Gender-Fair Machine Translation (2023)

Abstract: Recent years have seen a strongly increased visibility of non-binary people in public discourse. Accordingly, considerations of gender-fair language go beyond a binary conception of male/female. However, language technology, especially machine translation (MT), still suffers from binary gender bias. Proposing a solution for gender-fair MT beyond the binary from a purely technological perspective might fall short to accommodate different target user groups and in the worst case might lead to misgendering. To address this challenge, we propose a method and case study building on participatory action research to include experiential experts, i.e., queer and non-binary people, translators, and MT experts, in the MT design process. The case study focuses on German, where central findings are the importance of context dependency to avoid identity invalidation and a desire for customizable MT solutions.

## introduction with an increased visibility of non-binary people in public discourse, gender-fair language strategies to go beyond a binary conception of male/female have been proposed. gender-fair language subsumes gender-inclusive, i.e., linguistically including all gender identities, and gender-neutral, i.e., removing all gender references, strategies. practically applying gender-fair language across gram-matically different languages is challenging for human and machine translation. in human genderfair translation, substantial errors can be observed @xcite . in mt, the "masculine default" might have been mitigated with strategies to debias mt, however, generally with a binary focus @xcite and not linguistically acknowledging existing gender identities with few exceptions @xcite . @xcite call for research beyond nlp and its "narrow, problem-solving oriented approach" to advance the field and @xcite proposes to include queer and non-binary people in a community-informed translation process. the proposed case study builds on the notion that gender-fair (machine) translation requires an early community involvement. the word "machine" is at times placed in brackets since there was a common consensus that first genderfair translation strategies are required to facilitate gender-fair mt. to this end, ten researchers in austria organized a three-day workshop with in total 21 participants from three groups of stakeholders, i.e., queer and non-binary people, professional translators, and mt experts, to reflect on their experiences, desires, and concerns regarding mt. furthermore, we seek to provide a method that emphasizes the importance of human value, similar to the diverse voices method @xcite , and includes marginalized groups in technology design, i.e., with participatory design @xcite . in the proposed method, participatory action research (par) is utilized to design a set of activities to identify problems, desires, strategies, and proposed adaptations to the mt design process, as depicted in fig. 1 . in mt, it has been proposed to solve the issue by focusing on gender-neutral strategies @xcite , which, however, cannot be applied to all contexts, especially not without information loss, and might not be the strategy preferred by all mt users. in fact, findings from this workshop challenge the current mt paradigm of one input equals one output and reveal strong preferences for a customizable solutions that allow users to select their preferred strategy and make contextinformed suggestions. to the best of our knowledge, this is the first community-informed workshop on gender-fair (machine) translation with the explicit purpose to include human value and marginalized groups in the technology design process. in this paper, we describe the activities themselves, their practical implementation as a workshop with three groups of stakeholders, and a potential blueprint of the activities to develop similar workshops for other languages and communities. ## preliminaries to provide a theoretical basis for the following discussion, we first briefly explain the discourse on gender and language, and par as well as stakeholder selection taken from value-sensitive design. ## objective in our initial endeavors to develop a gender-fair mt model, we quickly realized that we not only lack training datasets but sufficient knowledge to decide on a gender-fair strategy for german. thus, our objective in organizing a workshop was to bring together three communities to jointly discuss considerations and implications that should be taken into account in designing gender-fair mt solutions. queer and non-binary people represent indirect stakeholders in the sense that their interaction with mt in the past or future is neither a given nor a requirement. nevertheless, this group is substantially impacted by gender-fair language use or the lack thereof. the active use of gender-inclusive or gender-neutral strategies in mt could positively affect the visibility of gender diversity, since its use is widespread and users are frequently not even aware of consuming mt outputs @xcite . professional translators are both direct and indirect stakeholders. in spite of some resistance @xcite , mt is increasingly integrated into translation pipelines @xcite , which makes translators direct stakeholders. on the other hand, as providers of translations for training mt models, they are indirect stakeholders who impact the technology. while translators at times might have been included in post-editing or mt evaluation studies, the two groups above have to the best of our knowledge not been included in the mt design and development process. finally, we decided to select mt developers/researchers as a stakeholder group to gather insights into the feasibility of ideas devised in group discussions and include their perspective on this topic in the cross-community exchange. to reach stakeholders, it is vital to include facilitators who are trustworthy to the respective communities, in particular in case of sensitive topics, and who can rely on personal networks and contacts for invitations of stakeholders. furthermore, such facilitators, in our case as part of the research team, need to actively help shape the plan in an appropriate and acceptable manner for participants, moderate the workshop, and intervene in group discussions if stagnation or conflicts arise. in terms of method, our objective was to encourage participants to share their experiences, desires, and concerns as well as informed critique on ex-isting gender-fair (machine) translation strategies and requirements. participatory action research (par) is designed to elicit and generate situated knowledge that provides insights beyond a unique case study and ensures an interactive, motivating design. thus, the design of our activities follows the par principles and cycles. ## participatory workshop activities the workshop plan was designed to alternate interactive sessions in small groups and plenary discussions on each of the five main topics and stages depicted in fig. 1 . activities in small groups deliberately alternated between groups constituted by members of the same stakeholder group (community-internal) and groups with members of each stakeholder group (cross-community). each interactive group activity was planned for approx. one hour and accompanied by written instructions, followed by approx. 30 minutes of presentation of results and plenary discussion. at the end of each day, a joint summary of major topics and findings was to be prepared in plenary session, including interactive quizzes and word clouds on mentimeter. ## participatory workshop in action a team of ten researchers from austria conducted a three-day participatory workshop on the topic of gender-fair mt with an initial focus of translating from and to german. our research team consisted of members of and people closely connected to the queer and non-binary community, professional translators with good contacts in this community, active mt and human-computer interaction researchers with a corresponding network. thus, we could strongly rely on our personal networks to invite participants and instill the necessary trust for participants to accept the invitation. participants were additionally recruited through activist groups and open calls, following a sampling strategy that allows for a spread of different marginalized experiences including intersecting aspects of marginalization. the workshop initially targeted ten participants for each community and stakeholder group. finally, in total 21 people participated, ten translators, six mt experts, and five queer and nonbinary people. several of these 21 participants had intersectional roles, e.g. translator and mt expert or non-binary and translator. given that the workshop was organized amidst the pandemic, we were grateful for this turnout and the substantial commitment of participants to take three days off their working week, one mt expert even traveled from switzerland. to establish a common basis of knowledge, we distributed a preparatory handout summarizing several gender-fair language strategies for german foot_0 . additionally, the handout provided pointers for further reading. in the following we present the results from the workshop activities (see section 4) by identified problems, proposed utopias, and strategic considerations for realizing gender-fair (machine) translation. ## reusability of the participatory workshop one option to address a more diversified pool of participants and reach a wider as well as slightly bigger audience could be to move a considerably shortened version of these activities online, as e.g. done by @xcite with more tool support for interactive sessions, e.g. miro to replace flipcharts, breakout groups in video conference tools, etc. since the nature of par projects is to be situated in a particular context and relationships in order to generate situated knowledge, targeting large audiences might benefit from a different methodological choice. nevertheless, a par project provides insights with wider implications from unique use cases, called "communicative generalization" @xcite . it addresses the "the significance of knowledge to epistemic communities rather than abstract universal truth" @xcite , facilitating the expression and perception of multiple perspectives, enriching the reader's generalized other, and problematizing situations that are taken for granted. our case study focused on the issue of genderfair (machine) translation from english to german as a starting point. while the proposed english materials might be reusable for workshops focused on other languages, adapting the activities to other languages should take culture-and communityspecific considerations into account. nevertheless, we believe that the general method and structure of the workshop can be utilized as a blueprint for further such workshops. on a general note, we recommend alternating group activities, within and across groups of stakeholders, with plenary sessions for joint reflections. each group should be observed by one team member in a non-participant manner to ensure to take notes on discussions and to intervene should any conflicts or situations of stagnation arise. for plenary sessions, we recommend live summaries that are projected so that participants can directly add/change notes. we provide the core ideas and principles of each activity to facilitate reproducing the workshop in different languages and contexts. pre-workshop preparation for any given research topic that seeks to involve various, frequently distinct groups of stakeholders, it is vi-tal to ensure that all participants share a common body of knowledge. to this end, a preparatory handout explaining the most essential facts can be distributed to all participants prior to the event. this requires preparing ahead to permit sufficient time for each participant to familiarize themselves with the provided contents. the advantage of this preparatory step is that the workshop can commence with interactive sessions instead of presenting content to participants and participants have the chance to familiarize themselves with the topic at their own pace. furthermore, it permits time for additional reading in case a single stakeholder feels they would like to know more about a topic -corresponding pointers should be included in the handout. warm-up with sensitive topics, such as gender identity in language, we recommend warm-up activities, such as a sociometric introduction (see section 4.1), and subtle as well as optional means to identify with a specific group of stakeholders or community. stage 1 & 2 at the beginning of the workshop activities, we utilize gender-fair texts and their machine translations to initiate the discussion on potential problems of the topic. these can easily be reproduced for other languages and with any available mt system, since the focus is not on translation adequacy but on triggering a discussion on gender-fair language. also utopia storming is an easily transferable activity that is best organized offline with a large pool of very different (handicraft) materials, e.g. colorful papers, scissors, building blocks, etc. for this stage, it is important to emphasize that proposed utopias neither need to be possible nor feasible, but could represent any dream vision. stage 3 for the hands-on activity, materials need to be adapted to the respective target culture and community. the chosen fictional characters and corresponding profiles should be well known by the participants to be able to present them in gender-fair language, e.g. there might be a better choice than pippi longstocking for other settings. for this activity, enough time should be provided for cross-community groups to consider different potential solutions before presenting the one of their choice for the specific fictional character. stage 4 after the practical application of strategies, the goal of strategy storming is to consciously think about preferred strategies for (machine) translation and in general. this stage can directly be transferred by adapting the instructions to the specific language. stage 5 the final stage seeks to discuss feasible solutions and their socio-technical implications as well as mutually beneficial aspects of community exchange. for this stage, we strongly recommend going from a community-internal to a crosscommunity group session in order to first discuss ideas within groups of stakeholders and then exchange these among groups. for this stage, materials to visualize thoughts and results are also very important to allow for groups to summarize their main points and sort their ideas. ## key mt implications as an overview, we summarize the key implications for gender-fair (machine) translation in the following list: par-based activities gradually brought new arguments from different communities to light and resulted in a catalog of criteria to guide the selection process of gender-fair language strategies for (machine) translation from the multiplicity of dynamically growing proposals, including practicability, ease of access, and universality. additionally, a central criterion was to provide means of addressing individuals without involuntarily outing their gender identity. furthermore, any gender-fair language use should be readable, comprehensible, and easy to learn and pronounce. in many cases, gender-neutral strategies, such as -ens, comply with these criteria, however, in a translation setting the inherent loss of context-specific information by omitting gender-specific information and plural forms might not be feasible. in a translation setting, a context-preserving target text irrespective of the specific strategy selected was deemed essential as well as further experiments on their translatability. one central issue with any gender-fair language strategy was a current lack of text samples for training mt systems but also for teaching and exemplifying each strategy, which mostly rely on conjugation and declination tables for their introduction. hands-on examples clearly showed that any automated method to detect and potentially alter gender-specific mentions in a text needs to go beyond grammatical gender or linguistic surface forms to also detect less obvious examples, such as mermaid. to overcome the issue of data for mt, hybrid methods with rule-based elements to synthetically generate text samples were proposed as well as to initiate mt adaptations with a community-informed intralingual system to translate from german to gender-fair german. in short, this idea of accommodating sev-eral gender-fair target texts depending on context and/or user preferences would fundamentally change the current mt paradigm, which relies on the correspondence of one source text with one target text. while the idea of providing different target texts to choose from has entered the world of commercial mt systems, e.g. allowing users to choose between male and female target sentences for a given input, this customization of mt to personalized gender-fair mt target texts would require further substantial adaptations and a community-informed, context-dependent decision on which gender-fair strategies to display if none are indicated by the user. to initiate this development, further research on the selection of genderfair language strategies that comply with the identified criteria is planned as future work, especially readability and comprehensibility. as an overall feedback on the workshop, participants were satisfied with the respectful, productive, and constructive atmosphere and there was a general consensus to have gathered new knowledge from the cross-community and communityinternal exchanges. concrete steps for continuing this inter-and transdisciplinary multi-professional teamwork in terms of readability studies and procuring gender-fair text samples have already been initiated. we as organizers were very grateful for the wealth of socio-technical ideas and arguments contributed by participants. we hope that their input will be used to guide future research on gender-fair mt.