Lost in Transliteration: Not My Name, Not My Gender

Authors

Liuhuaying Yang (Complexity Science Hub)

Presentation

Session

VISAP Pictorial

Time

Wednesday, Nov 11, 13:36 – 13:48 (US/Eastern) · session 13:00 – 14:30

Location

Hall Essex south

Keywords

Chinese names; transliteration; pinyin ambiguity; algorithmic bias; identity loss; data visualization; interactive tool; language and identity; Not My Name; Not My Gender

Abstract

Chinese names, filtered through Western transliteration, lose meaning. Identity is flattened into sound, reduced to Latin script. Not My Name and Not My Gender are interactive tools built on Chinese dictionaries and 1.2 billion Chinese names. They reveal how pinyin, the Romanized system rendering Chinese names, compresses over 8,000 characters into at most 413 syllables. This compression further complicates gender inference, especially when name-gender association is perceived as a spectrum: gender inferred from pinyin syllables retains only about 24% of the pattern in original characters. The work invites reflection on naming, language, and cultural assumptions embedded in technological systems.