BACKGROUND

A long line of research shows that the words we use directly affect the way we think. Whether we notice it or not, our language is infused with countless gender-biased words. Study shows that ‘language appears to play a particularly important role in forming people’s attitudes toward gender and occupation’ (Harris, Biencowe, Telem, 2018).

The effects that gender bias has on language can influence women to be ‘less likely to apply for jobs with masculine suffixes’. The terms cameraman, mailman, fireman and salesman create a biased view on what we, as a society, think are appropriate roles for men and women.

ELaN Languages, an independent translation organisation in Belgium, wanted to show the impact of the words we use and how those words unconsciously shape our biases. Especially because they encounter those words every day, either by translating for clients directly or through their online translation tool.

CREATIVE IDEA 

ELaN Languages wanted to tackle our unconscious bias by updating their online translation tool with a new feature: ‘the unbias button’. This plug-in offers unbiased translations of biased words. Making us aware of our unconscious bias by translating bias words, such as job titles, into gender-neutral words.

Fireman becomes firefighter, mailman becomes mail carrier. And the reverse is also true, with midwife becoming birth assistant. And thus, thousands of biased words in ElaN Languages’ database received an unbiased translation into English when the ‘the unbias button’ was applied.

To inspire change throughout the translation business, ELaN made this extensive database of gender-neutral words available to the giants of this industry, such as Google Translate, iTranslate and Yandex Translate.

STRATEGY 

ELaN Languages knew that a powerful insight as theirs needed more than a traditional marketing solution. So rather than starting a campaign, it started with their own product. It wanted to provoke a new mindset by design to have the biases around language appear naturally and providing a simple solution to solve it. Making it easy for people to make better unbiased decisions in their language.

As a challenger brand, ELaN wanted to press the issue beyond their own product. Raising awareness through film and openly invite their main competitors to implement the same unbiased words as alternatives. That is why they chose to make their database of gender-neutral alternatives to a wide variety of words available to all translation tools and services.

EXECUTION

Creating ‘the unbias button’ seemed deceivingly simple, but required a team of experts consisting of professional linguists, translators and polyglot programmers. First ELaN Languages had to compile an extensive list of biased words by hand to create a database for the translation tool. Then their translators had to match this database with a broad selection of unbiased alternatives.

The tool was then designed to highlight biased words in translations by ELaN’s programmers and could provide several unbiased alternatives for every highlighted word on click. And by using ‘the unbiased button’ the entire translated text could be filtered to change biased words to unbiased ones.

A film was created, highlighting these biases that had lingered for so long and the importance of getting rid of unbiased words for future generations. ELaN Languages invited other translation giants like Google Translate, iTranslate and Yandex Translate to follow suit and integrate more unbiased alternatives.

RESULTS & IMPACT

With the help of the meticulous labour of their translators, ELaN Languages manually identified thousands of biased words in the English vocabulary. All these words were assigned one or several substitutes resulting in over even more unbiased alternatives. These words weren’t just integrated in their own translation tool, but also made public for the industry to use.

This effort didn’t go unnoticed with ELaN Languages’ competitors and international press. The film with the rallying call to start using more unbiased words was launched on International Women’s day and got picked up immediately by major publishers like Adweek, The Stable, AdAge, the Chinese 163.com and LSN Global.

This gave the power of words an equal stake at the table when it comes to the gender equality discussion. And will result in more and more people around the world making conscious decisions about the words they use.