{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/directing-the-violence-or-admonishing-it-a","title":"Directing the violence or admonishing it? A survey of contronymy and androcentrism in Google Translate and some recommendations","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2021-08-18","proceeding":null,"authors":["Anonymous"],"abstract":"The recent raft of high-profile gaffes involving neural machine translation technologies has brought to light the unreliability of this evolving technology. A worrisome\nfacet of the ubiquity of this technology is that it largely operates in a use-it-at-yourown-peril mode where the user is often unaware of either the idiosyncratic brittleness of the underlying neural translation model or when it is, that the translations\nbe deemed trustworthy and when they wouldn’t. These revelations have worryingly\ncoincided with other developments such as the emergence of large language models\nthat now produce biased and erroneous results, albeit with human-like fluency, the\nuse of back-translation as a data-augmentation strategy in so termed ’low-resource’\nsettings and the emergence of ’AI-enhanced legal-tech’ as a panacea that promises\n’disruptive democratization’ of access to legal services. In the backdrop of these\nquandaries, we present this cautionary tale where we shed light on the specifics\nof the risks surrounding cavalier deployment of this technology by exploring two\nspecific failings: Androcentrism and Enantiosemy. In this regard, we empirically\ninvestigate the fate of the pronouns and a list of contronyms when subjected to\nback-translation using Google Translate. Through this, we seek to highlight the\nprevalence of ’defaulting-to-the-masculine’ phenomenon in the context of engendered profession-related translations and also empirically demonstrate the scale and\nnature of threats pertaining to contronymous phrases covering both current-affairs\nand legal issues. Based on these observations, we have collected a series of recommendations that constitute the latter half of this paper. All of the code and datasets\ngenerated in this paper have been open-sourced for the community to build on here:\nhttps://github.com/rteehas/GT_study_recommendations.\n","url_abs":"https://openreview.net/forum?id=13LjoyYWcaw","url_pdf":"https://openreview.net/pdf?id=13LjoyYWcaw","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"directing-the-violence-or-admonishing-it-a","repo_url":"https://github.com/rteehas/gt_study_recommendations","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"data-augmentation","task_name":"Data Augmentation"},{"task_slug":"machine-translation","task_name":"Machine Translation"},{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}