Bias Shield

Bias Shield is a small Chrome extension (roughly 185 KiB) built by developer Michal Měchura that turns two of the most widely used machine translation sites into more transparent, more inclusive tools. The problem it targets is well known in translation studies: statistical and neural machine translation systems regularly default to masculine pronouns and gendered forms when the source text is ambiguous, silently narrowing meaning in languages where gender is obligatory.

The extension works on top of Google Translate and DeepL instead of replacing them. Two debiasing engines are wired in. DeBiasByUs is a community project collecting reports of gender-biased translations; Bias Shield lets you submit the biased output you just received and, in return, warns you when a translation has already been reported, offering a corrected alternative where the community has provided one. Fairslator detects and automatically repairs biases caused by ambiguity in gender and forms of address, and Bias Shield embeds its controls directly into the translator pages so you never have to switch tabs.

Bias Shield is distributed on the Chrome Web Store free of charge, declares that it does not collect or sell user data, and is published by an individual developer rather than a company. It is a lightweight, privacy-conscious helper rather than a full translation platform, which makes it easy to try and easy to remove.