ABSTRACT
Google Translate is the most popular machine translation tool available, supporting over 100 languages. Its use varies from a starting point for professional translators to a quick search for word equivalents from one language to another by a language user. Despite its popularity and wide use in different sectors, some still raise concerns over how the popular machine translation tool perpetuates gender bias and stereotypical notions of masculinity and femininity. In simple terms, gender bias is defined as having preferential treatment for one gender over another. It is said that gender bias occurs in the use of different machine translation tools when certain gender-neutral words in the source language tend to yield male defaults or gender-specific words in the target language (Prates et al. 2020).
While there are studies on building Filipino-specific machine translation platforms, there is no systematic research yet on the topic at hand in Filipino or other Philippine languages. It is the aim of this study to contribute to the discourse on gender bias in machine translation by investigating how this issue is observed in Filipino-to-English translation using Google Translate. The corpus is from popular Filipino tabloid newspapers and comics, as well as formulated context-free texts. The sentences contain gender-neutral pronouns, occupations, activities, and adjectives and are tested in the translation platform thereafter.
