Promoting machine translation literacy: A focus on gender mistranslations and bias in English-Italian NMT

This article reports on a survey on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Translation (MT) conducted among graduate-level learners of English at the University of Turin, Italy, within the framework of the project Linguistic rights and language varieties of Europe in the age of artificial intelligence. The participants attended an English-Italian MT module aimed at illustrating the functioning of MT, its current affordances and limitations, and its impact on issues such as multilingualism, language variation, and gender representation. Thee survey consisted of two questionnaires administered at the beginning (Q1) and at the end (Q2) of the module; the objective was to gather information about the students’ background, their knowledge of AI tools and their use of MT.