Cultural and Linguistic Bias of Neural Machine Translation Technology

Neural machine translation is not neutral. The increased linguistic fluency and naturalness as the hallmark of neural machine translation sometimes runs the risk of trans-creation, which bends the true meaning of the source text to accommodate the conventionalized, preferred use and interpretation of concepts, terms and expressions in the target language and cultural system. This chapter explores the cultural and linguistic bias of neural machine translation of English educational resources on mental health and well-being, highlighting the urgent need to develop and redesign machine translation systems to produce more neutral and balanced machine translation outputs for global end users, especially people from vulnerable social backgrounds.