Since 2024, the Galician Audiovisual Services Corporation (CSAG) has used an AI-powered automatic subtitling service – developed specifically for the Galician language – to improve accessibility to content published on social media. The platform with the highest engagement rate, particularly amongst younger viewers, is the Instagram account G24Noticias. This account posts a daily average of 25 short videos featuring journalists, interviewees and public figures speaking in Galician, Spanish, Catalan and English, all subtitled into Galician. Given the media's role in promoting linguistic forms and shaping language attitudes within a society, we examine whether the videonews published on this far-reaching medium comply with the public broadcaster's commitment and legal obligation to ensure non-sexist language use and promote gender equality. To this end, we analysed the usage of the generic masculine form – considered sexist because it renders women invisible – across all 683 videonews posted over one month, taking into account the potential spatial and temporal constraints of subtitling. The results reveal significant room for improvement: 60% of the generic masculine forms could have been replaced with non-sexist alternatives without affecting the brevity or fluency of the subtitled text. This high percentage demonstrates that automated workflows currently replicate gender biases rather than mitigating them, despite the availability of viable linguistic alternatives. Consequently, this study serves a dual purpose. First, it provides empirical evidence that the CSAG could reorient its linguistic policies towards more egalitarian communication. Second, it offers inclusive alternatives that could be integrated into the automatic subtitling system to avoid sexist forms and gender bias wherever possible.
Patricia Sotelo Dios combines her professional practice as a freelance translator with her academic role as an associate lecturer in the Department of Translation and Linguistics at the University of Vigo. She holds a PhD in Translation from the same institution, where she also worked as a researcher at the Computational Linguistics Group. Previously, she was an instructor of Spanish at the University of Iowa and a researcher at the Centre for Humanistic Studies of the University of Minho. Her academic background includes bachelor's degrees in English Philology and Translation and Interpreting, alongside master's degrees in Editing and Foreign Language Education. She is a member of the Galician Association of Translators and Interpreters (AGPTI), the Spanish Association of Audiovisual Translation and Adaptation (ATRAE), and the Translation & Paratranslation (T&P) research group. Her research focuses on corpus linguistics, audiovisual translation and translation studies based on parallel and multimedia corpora.