Google Translate Learns To Reduce Gender Bias (cnet.com)

Google is working to make Translate less gender-biased by giving both a feminine and masculine translation for a single word. "Previously, the service defaulted to the masculine options," reports CNET. "The new function is available when translating words from English into French, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish and Spanish. It provides a similar function when translating into English." From the report: Google Translate learns from the hundreds of millions of already-translated examples available on the internet, creating an opportunity for the tool to incorporate the gender bias it encountered online, according to a Google blog post announcing the change. With the update, Google Translate will present translations for both genders. For example, if you translate "o bir doktor" from Turkish to English, you'll see "she is a doctor" and "he is a doctor" in the translation box. In November, Google also made Gmail's Smart Compose technology stop suggesting gender-based pronouns. Previously, it defaulted to masculine pronouns.

Comments

Google Translate didn't learn anything

[Spy Handler]

It's programmers at Google who made the changes. TFT makes it sound like Google Translate became sentient, then became woke (in the social justice sense), and came to the conclusion, all on its own, that defaulting to masculine gender is sexist/misogynist/bad.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

There are only 2 genders. The rest are mental illness.