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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.
When you read something translated from Japanese, where gender isn't always specified in the sentence, Google translate will alternate between masculine and feminine while referring to the same individual.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I get looking up a word like devil and getting back both diablo and diabla. But if I type in
SienÃra es la diabla
and translate back to english, I better not get both
The woman is the devil
The man is the devil
That phrase in latin languages has absolute gender already assigned.
Interesting. Wikipedia says:
The language is best known for its system of noun classes, numbering four in total. They tend to be divided among the following semantic lines:
I - most animate objects, men
II - women, water, fire, violence, and exceptional animals[7]
III - edible fruit and vegetables
IV - miscellaneous (includes things not classifiable in the first three)
I guess we should be more politically correct in English for those of us who consider themselves to be "edible fruit and vegetables."
Incipiamus, fratres, servire Domino Deo, quia hucusque vix vel parum in nullo profecimus.
I think the confusion is that a noun class != gender. In many languages noun classes tend to follow gendered lines, but usually not exclusively or even always predictably. In some cases this practice can lead to cultural associations that see a particular object as "male" or "female"--such as in medieval Latin the Church (ecclesia) is pretty consistently seen as female. In other cases, however, it's purely semantic and people don't necessarily even think of the object as "having" a gender even though its noun is gendered. Hence in Spanish pan ("bread") is masculine, but I don't recall ever seeing it treated as something intrinsically male.
I would wager that it's English's neuter that has actually caused the political strife over gendered language today. The tendency to see all non-living nouns as neuter has made it so that the gender of masculine and feminine nouns has become associated more closely with the actual sex of the object being described. Accordingly, it becomes natural for some to assume that if a masculine word is used about something (e.g. God) then it implies that the object is male, even though grammatically that is not necessarily the case. I've heard people with other languages object that this is not an issue in their language, and I think it's because these other languages do not treat all non-living objects as neuter. For example, the German pronoun man ("one") is seen as avoiding such a problem because it is different from the word Mann ("man"). But really man is still masculine grammatically. The real reason it is not thought of by some as offensive is simply because in German it's common for non-sexed/non-living objects to be masculine or feminine grammatically.
Incipiamus, fratres, servire Domino Deo, quia hucusque vix vel parum in nullo profecimus.
Forget about curing cancer or colonizing Mars, the crowning achievment of a Sillicon Valley giant today is gender options in translation.
It's history more than language that creates the issues in English. To use your example of God, the primary religions of Europe all have a male god who made the first man in his image. The first woman was made to keep him company and provide him with children, which pretty much set up the model for how people thought about women and feminine things in general - there to serve men.
That's why machines are usually referred to as female, e.g. ships. They were, until comparatively recently, created by, controlled by and served men. Often they protected men too, like a mother protects a child. Those men often developed some affection for their machines, which would have been uncomfortable had the ship been considered male because at the major religions considered homosexuality to be a sin.
It's that projection of masculine/feminine traits on to inanimate objects based on their role relative to traditional gender roles that is the issue.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC