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

Good!

[azcoyote]

It is important for it to give both in cases where both are equally valid. When I saw the headline, I was worried that it was gender-neutralizing, which is typically not helpful.

Re:Good!

[HornWumpus]

Only 'both'? Language is 'transphobic', words need 56+ genders!

Plus one more for 'motion towards'.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re: Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

3 genders for substantives
-feminine
-masculine
-neutral for things only

Re:Good!

[Pseudonym]

Dyirbal has four.

Re: Good!

[cgriffiths]

Bantu languages have a lot of noun classes aka genders with one having 20. Tuyuka however with around 1,000 speakers in Brazil has an estimated 50-140 noun classes.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

You wish there were only 56 genders.

http://genderfluidsupport.tumblr.com/gender

Gender Master List [heavily abridged - Ed.]

Apconsugender: a gender where you know what it isn't, but not what it is; the gender is hiding itself from you

Caelgender: a gender which shares qualities with outer space or has the aesthetic of space, stars, nebulas, etc.

Collgender: the feeling of having too many genders simultaneously to describe each one

Demi-smoke: A transcendental, spiritual gender roughly drifting to other genders that are unable to be foreseen and understood, shrouded in darkness within your inner visual. Elevating through mystery. Caused by a lack of inner interpretation and dark emotional states.

Hydrogender: a gender which shares qualities with water

Juxera: a feminine gender similar to girl, but on a separate plane and off to itself

Magigender: a gender that is mostly gender and the rest is something else

Perigender: identifying with a gender but not as a gender

Surgender: having a gender that is 100% one gender but with more of another gender added on top of that

Vapogender: a gender that sort of feels like smoke; can be seen on a shallow level but once you go deeper, it disappears and you are left with no gender and only tiny wisps of what you thought it was

Re:Good!

[azcoyote]

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."

Re: Good!

[azcoyote]

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.

Re:Good!

[Scarletdown]

The very rare, yet still real hermaphrodite makes the count 3.

2 shall ye not count to, unless ye continue on to 3. 5 is way out!

Re:Good!

[AmiMoJo]

I guess we should be more politically correct in English for those of us who consider themselves to be "edible fruit and vegetables."

This is a very common misunderstanding of what gender expression is. People who subscribe to that model of gender think that gender is performative, i.e. you can't be edible fruit because you can't live as edible fruit. You can live as a man or a woman or something else on that spectrum though, by altering your appearance and behaviour etc.

Re: Good!

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re: Good!

[Shadow of Eternity]

Alternatively you can interpret machines being female because they're precious, valuable, and cherished by those around them. Your problem is that your entirely worldview and thought process always starts with the same foregone conclusion and simply works backwards to invent justifications for it from there.

Re: Good!

[Solandri]

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.

The languages which do this are less reliant on word order. You're free to switch around word order, and the article ("the") in front of the noun and how you conjugate the verb give you hints as to which noun is the subject, which is the object. For whatever reason, a lot of the European languages settled on three different groupings of nouns as a good number to get this system working. Three is probably a popular choice because it's the closest integer to e (2.718...), and when you minimize the complexity of a system, the optimal number of groupings tends to converge on e. (e.g. Computers would actually make slightly more efficient use of memory if each bit could represent 3 different values, not 2). Anyhow, if you've got three groupings, masculine / feminine / neuter are kind of natural labels.

Some languages use more groupings. Some use none (one). English is one of the languages which uses none ("the" is the same for all nouns). As a consequence, English is much more restrictive in how you're allowed to arrange the words, and the word order tells you which noun is the subject, which the object. So in English, "The dog bit the man" relies on word order to tell you that the dog was the one doing the biting. In other languages, you could phrase it "the man bit the dog" and the verb conjugation and articles would tell you that it was the dog doing the biting. It might sound funny, bit it's perfectly understandable. Whereas in English, switching the word order around completely changes the meaning of the sentence.

Other languages which use no groupings use helper words to denote which noun is the subject or object (e.g. Japanese 'wa'). So the word order remains flexible.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a very common misunderstanding of what gender expression is. People who subscribe to that model of gender think that gender is performative, i.e. you can't be edible fruit because you can't live as edible fruit. You can live as a man or a woman or something else on that spectrum though, by altering your appearance and behaviour etc.

To mangle an old quote; Gender is objective, anatomical, and binary, all else is the work of Man."

Re: Good!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

the primary religions of Europe all have a male god who made the first man in his image

My pagan friends would probably slap you. At best, those are secondary religions. Filthy imports, bah!

It's history more than language that creates the issues in English.

What creates issues in English is the bizarre intermediate state between keeping Indo-European grammatical gender and ditching it.

Re:Good!

[ByteSlicer]

It is important for it to give both in cases where both are equally valid.

I agree, but lets not make it so verbose. And don't forget neutral. So I propose:
s/h/it is going to hit the fan.

Re: Good!

[npmccallum]

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.

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.

Neither of these cases have anything to do with noun class. The typological relationship that the New Testament sets up is that God is the Father (read: paterfamilias, for those acquainted with Roman legal structures) who has a fully grown Son (Jesus Christ) who is coming to claim the estate of his Father as the legal executor. In the process, he is using his legal authority to graft humanity into the family. This is most commonly expressed as a relationship of legal adoption (through baptism). But it is also expressed as a marriage relationship between Christ, as groom, and the church, as bride.

The association of male gender for God and female gender for the church has nothing to do with the case of the noun. It is entirely predicated by the topological relationship established in the New Testament. However, there is no claim that God is *actually* male. In fact, numerous theologians had argued this was not the case by the end of the 5th century. Likewise, the church is not *actually* female.

In the 20th century, a move arose to call God female in Christian churches. That it met with a moderate amount of success is not surprising considering the developing movement of feminism and the fact that God is not male or female, but is merely called male in a certain rhetorical domain. The counter-response to this movement which demands that God be called exclusively male arises out of a concern that such a move obscures the NT rhetorical relationships and therefore does actual damage to the text by injecting female pronouns for God. Wherever you might stand on such an argument, nobody is making the claim that God is actually male or female.

Re: Good!

[khmseu]

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.

Nope. We have the exact same problem in German, where we have all these gendered nouns. Incidentally, English hasn't completely forgotten those genders, even though they are no longer part of the grammar. There are lots of things you think of as male or female (so use "she" or "he"), usually (or at least in the examples I'm currently thinking of) the same as the French grammatical gender, which is often opposite the German one. So the moon is often a "she", the sun a "he" (German does it the other way around),

Re: Good!

[c6gunner]

They were inherently more valuable. That's obviously changed in recent times.

Re: Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the proper pronoun for neuter is "it". However, people who claim to have no gender like to refer to themselves in the third person plural, because they also have a turd in their pocket that they also want have acknowledged. Thus, instead of "my" they say "our", or instead of "I" they say "we".

Re: Good!

[c6gunner]

You can live as a man or a woman or something else on that spectrum though, by altering your appearance and behaviour etc.

Yeah, right. You can live as black by growing dreadlocks and speaking Ebonics.

Re: Good!

[Ol Olsoc]

It's also a bit misandrist in that it seems to imply that women are more deserving of or perhaps more inherently precious and valuable and cherished.

It is not remotely misandrist to understand that women are more valuable. In natural conditions, where survival is paramount, one woman is worth dozens of men - whihc means the woman stays alive, but resource management means the surplus men are either culled or cast out.

In extremis, I understand that I will be terminated long before a female. That's just how it is.

Which is all the stranger in these strange times, that a large number of females wish to emulate the weaker of the 2 sexes.

Meanwhile the gender free anthem: The personperson brought me person, and placed it in the personperson.

Anyone care to translate that into patriarchal misogynist text?

tl;dr Women in Africa are undergoing forced clitorectomy, while here in the west, outrage springs from the "gender" of an object. Not a real comparison or whataboutism, just a reflection of how silly humanity is, and our fucked up priorities.

Re: Good!

[AmiMoJo]

In natural conditions

Yeah, but we aren't in natural conditions. Appealing to the nature of prehistoric mankind as justification for behaviour today isn't a very compelling argument.

Re: Good!

[azcoyote]

You're partly right. In Christianity, both men and women are explicitly created in the image of God. It's the first story of creation (Genesis 1) that talks about this, and in that story both man and woman are created at the same time and both are clearly stated to be in the image of God. Only the second story of creation shows woman being created second, but even there it makes no claim that woman is somehow lesser. It does not state that woman is created to serve man, but that woman is a suitable helper or companion. It even says that "it is not good for man to be alone." Hence there is a sense in which woman completes man; man needs woman; this cannot be said about the relationship between a master and a servant. Instead, the second story of creation portrays the historical subservience of woman to man as to some extent a consequence of sin rather than as something altogether natural or divinely-willed.

In the New Testament, Paul complicates this in 1 Corinthians 11, where he says that man is the image of God, and woman the image of man. This actually runs contrary to the main point of Genesis, and Paul's point is something different. Accordingly, when the great theologians dealt with this issue, they had to see both Paul and Genesis true but in different ways. Thus Thomas Aquinas argues that in the primary and most important sense, both men and women are the image of God, and women are not less than men. For him, Paul is correct only in a secondary, lesser sense. Even in this sense, woman is not somehow less than man. Rather, it's a mere statement of origin: just as God is the beginning of man, man is the beginning of woman (because Eve was made from Adam's rib). This is somewhat symbolic of the hierarchy of the family, but it is not a statement of women's inferiority.

I do think that cultural-psychological connections underlie the association of many objects with femininity in language. This is shown in the Oxford English Dictionary's best speculation about there the word "gun" comes from: simply put, it originated from men affectionately naming their cannons "Gunhilda," a feminine name that means "war." This is not unrelated to the Oedipus Complex: men realize themselves as subjects through a relationship to the feminine embodied in the mother and spouse; thus in tangible existence they often concretize this relationship through their interaction with objects.

However, it's important to understand that in many cases the grammatical feminine does not really line up with a cultural assumption of femininity, and is not clearly explainable in cultural terms. For example, in German, Latin, and all of its child languages, all abstract nouns are typically feminine (e.g. virtue, community), even if this abstract noun is associated with masculinity (manliness, courage). It's not as though the speaker really thinks that all concepts are somehow women. Nor are concepts seen as something servile or inferior; in fact, many systems of thought such as Platonism have elevated concepts as superior to the world of experience.

Re:Good!

[cascadingstylesheet]

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]

Hmm, sounds "sexist" right out of the box. Men are living things, women are uncontrollable forces of nature.

Re: Good!

[Dragonslicer]

To use your example of God, the primary religions of Europe all have a male god who made the first man in his image.

Which religions are those? They sure aren't any of the Judaism-based religions.

26 And God said: 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.' 27 And God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.

The text goes back and forth between singular and plural, but it's pretty clear that both male and female humans are created "in the image of God".

Re: Good!

[azcoyote]

Thank you for your comment. As a professional theologian, I definitely had the traditional idea of the Church as the Bride of Christ in mind. It no doubt did contribute to the tendency to see the Church as feminine. I would argue, also, that it's not that symbol alone that is at work here, but also something grammatical. In the Old Testament prophets, for example, the language of Israel as bride is extremely prominent. However, Israel is not exclusively spoken of female, because it is a masculine word and the moniker of Jacob. Thus Israel is also spoken of as a "son." In contrast, I think the Church became exclusively associated with femininity because of its grammatical femininity combined with feminine biblical and traditional images. The incidental contribution of human language does not diminish the revelatory character of this association, because as with all of Scripture, God allows himself to be spoken through human language. Just as the flesh of Christ is integral to salvation, so also is language the privileged vehicle of a truth that exceeds and defies all speaking.

Re: Good!

[Ol Olsoc]

In natural conditions

Yeah, but we aren't in natural conditions. Appealing to the nature of prehistoric mankind as justification for behaviour today isn't a very compelling argument.

You sound like the people who accidentally kill their cats because they force them to be vegan. Because you don't need to pay any attention to nature, amirite? It's not compelling.

And you slippery sloped me there. It is pretty obvious that we aren't in hunter gatherer mode any more for the most part.

But I say that there are women in parts of the world who are being horribly mistreated, while the west is losing thier shit because of abysmally stupid things like the gender of inanimate objects. Forced clitorectomy, burying in dirt up to their head and stoned to death for petty infractions or beheaded. Acid thrown in their faces. Forced prepubescent marriages to old men.

And that is exactly why I consider 3rd wave feminism more of deep seated hatred against western society than any actual attempt to improve the lot of women in the world. It isn't hypocrisy, its pure hatred, an attack on minescule things, while ignoring real and present criminality. Why is it I bring up genuine harm being done to women, while the Feminists in here are busy tidying up their little corner, making certain that nothing bothers them - except here? The incredible crime of assigning non gender translations to things. Teach me. This is so obvious to me that I must be completely off base and wrong - stupid in fact. Explain why one garners mass attention while the other hardly gets mentioned.

Re: Good!

[dunkelfalke]

Eh?
courage is der Mut in German, that is a masculine noun.

Re:Good!

[azcoyote]

Even intersex (hermaphroditism) is not really another gender, but a mixed expression of the two. This is because gender is not a purely static, unrelated absolute, as though "male" were definable in its own terms without reference to "female." After all, "male" is that which is oriented toward mating with "female," and vice versa. Even before all of our cultural assumptions about gender, there is a biological distinction that has everything to do with mutual relationship. Intersex, in contrast, is not one condition but many different conditions. To my understanding, there are even cases when someone with a Y chromosome will not develop fully as a male. Nevertheless, in every case we think of intersex in reference to male and female, as somehow expressing one, the other, or both. In no case is intersex something completely different with no relation whatsoever to male or female. We don't really even have a concept of a third gender, but only of an interplay of male and female that is not readily categorizable within one or the other. In Slashdot terms, intersex is more akin to a state of subatomic indeterminancy or else the non-value "null" (vs. boolean true or false).

The irony is that once we abstract from biological gender and make it into a cultural construct, we are still bound by the same duality even when we insist that gender is fluid or indeterminate or else changeable. To say that a biological man can become a woman still implies to some extent that there is something called "woman" that stands underneath and behind culture. There are of course some people who claim to be beyond male or female, or at least who refuse to be defined by those terms, but even in such a case they are definable as those who militate against male and female, and thus are still dependent on that duality.

Re: Good!

[azcoyote]

Ha, I was worried someone would call me on that. I was thinking more of Latin audacia there. Again, not all abstract nouns as feminine, but in German and Latin there are more often feminine than masculine. Latin virtus is the best example, because it comes from vir, "man," and has a sense of "manliness," but it is grammatically feminine. In medieval culture sometimes the conceptual masculinity of the word even functioned in a sexist way; women were seen as lacking in manly virtue. On the other hand, St. Catherine of Siena still sees virtue as manliness but does not think that it is beyond women. She went so far as to scold the pope and tell him essentially to "man up."

Re: Good!

[AmiMoJo]

Come on Ol, taking it to an absurd extreme and then whataboutism?

Re: Good!

[DRJlaw]

To use your example of God, the primary religions of Europe all have a male god who made the first man in his image.

27 And God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.

The text goes back and forth between singular and plural, but it's pretty clear that both male and female humans are created "in the image of God".

You literally copied the gendered pronouns, and then ignored them and the semicolon that separates clauses based upon the lame excuse that some other words are plural?

No. Even an atheist like me can see that you need a grammar review.

Re: Good!

[azcoyote]

You miss the point of language. Hebrew, like most languages, tends to use male as the default, so "them" is still masculine but by context it includes both male and female. In the same way, the singular "him" is masculine because it refers back to "man," which is masculine, but "man" is descriptive of both male and female. Likewise, the word "homo" in Latin (the source of "human") is not neuter but masculine, but even in Latin it refers to a species that is considered to be both male and female. To my understanding, gender was often so grammatical in Latin (rather than determined by the object) that in some cases you would even be forced to use a masculine word for a woman, e.g. poeta.

There's no doubt that because of gender bias people have often thought of God as though God were male. But if you actually asked an ancient Hebrew, he or she would probably have scoffed at the question. After all, the Israelites specifically differed from the religions around them because they did not see God as having a consort. They did not see sex as relevant to divinity. Because of this, the Old Testament does at times use feminine imagery to speak about God as well, e.g. Isa 49:15–16:

"Can a mother forget her infant, / be without tenderness for the child of her womb? / Even should she forget, / I will never forget you.

Re: Good!

[DRJlaw]

You miss the point that citing one particular English translation of an ancient text, and doing it badly at that, does nothing to inform concerning the beliefs of "the primary religions of Europe."

The language is what it is. The philosophy behind the language is not proven by it.

Re: Good!

[Pseudonym]

"Das Mädchen"

Re: Good!

[Shadow of Eternity]

There's no such thing as "whataboutism". That's nothing more than a bad faith silencing tactic from the same family of fallacies as loaded questions. Even moreso when your entire shtick is claiming a moral highground and particular belief system and someone is pointing out the invalidity of those claims.

Whataboutism is shouting that you're egging someone's house because you oppose all animal cruelty and meat eating and then crying foul when someone points out that you spent your morning kicking puppies and have the people throwing eggs had bacon at breakfast.

It's actually kind of annoying

[phantomfive]

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.

Re:It's actually kind of annoying

[h33t l4x0r]

That's what talking to Filipinos in English is like. They grow up without gender pronouns and it's hard to get used to.

Re:It's actually kind of annoying

[Rockoon]

Now I am reminded of a News Radio episode. The owner of the radio station, billionaire Jimmy James, wrote a book that sold poorly in America but the Japanese translation was a best seller in Japan. So he had the Japanese version translated back into English, which was now titled "Jimmy James Macho Business Donkey Wrester"

newsradio macho business donkey wrestler

This show was excellent. They had this idea before these translators existed.

Re:It's actually kind of annoying

[Anonymous Coward]

Google translate isn't very good with Japanese anyway. So far I have only had success with technical documents and not really with anything where gender of people would matter. For such a purpose Atlas does a much better job at translating from Japanese to English. It's based on a dictionary lookup, meaning it has awareness of grammar and a whole different kind of context awareness than Google translate. This means you can actually teach it new words and by selecting grammar rules (name of male person or adjective or whatever) it will try to use it correctly.

The pitfall with Atlas is if you spend a year or two perfecting the dictionary, how much Japanese would you have learned in the same time? However keep in mind that untweaked Atlas is often much better than Google translate.

There are multiple tools where hovering over a word will look it up in a dictionary, tell how it's pronounced etc. Spend the time on those instead and study some grammar and it won't take ages before you can fight Google translate for translation quality. Good will take years, but machine translation quality is doable within reasonable time. Unlike machine translations, if you do it yourself, you can always improve.

Last but not least, you need to figure out if it's worth your time, like how much Japanese will you read in the future? I got a hunch that having the experience of an individual switching gender multiple times in Google translate could point toward reading some story based, like visual novels. Those are usually not worth reading unless you at least try to aim for a human translation.

There has been multiple tests where people read the same with machine translation and in actual Japanese (not the same people) and with the language used in fictional story telling like that, they end up with entirely different stories. Machine translations sort of comes up with a story, but it's not the same as the original and differently tweaked translators can also come up with different stories. In the best internet style, this is the culprit in a lot of fights where people can't agree which titles are good or bad.

Re:It's actually kind of annoying

[phantomfive]

The advantage of Google Translate for Japanese is: its handwriting input method is perfect. I can write the character incorrectly and a lot of times it will still figure out what I meant. That's why I keep coming back to it, even with the mediocre translation.

Re:It's actually kind of annoying

[AmiMoJo]

The bigger issue with translating Japanese is that it often rephrases things to be personal. Instead of "a bug was found in app 1.0" it comes out as "I found a bug in app 1.0".

Google Translate has got a lot better at this, but now it tends to err on the side of being impersonal. The only way to fix it is to understand the context of the statement, but they don't seem to have the ability to do that yet.

Re: It's actually kind of annoying

[phantomfive]

Oh yeah, that's true, I see that one a lot, too.

Re:It's actually kind of annoying

[Mashiki]

That's because Google is taking words to be literal, instead of including them into proper sentences when punctuation is used in many cases. Compare the differences between Atlas, Bing and Google translations. Atlas and Bing are fare more likely to be correct because they're paying attention to the grammatical rules.

Re:It's actually kind of annoying

[philmarcracken]

Personal pronouns are rarely even expressed when they don't have to be but in english they must be. It wouldn't be hard to just stick with and call it a day. Oh look slashdot eats kanji that I write, syobon

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:Google Translate didn't learn anything

[110010001000]

Google (and the entire industry) is desperately trying to convince people that AI is real and that computers are "learning".

Re:Google Translate didn't learn anything

[bursch-X]

If the programmers and/or the bosses who call the shot become "woke" (which is totally the case with Goolag) then they will end up programming either "woke" AI, or something akin to HAL9000 – the machine will fail to handle the cognitive dissonance between the lofty supposed goals and the horrible, horrible practises put in place under the label of "progress", "equality", and "diversity".

Languages

[arth1]

The new function is available when translating words from English into French, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish and Spanish.

So four Romance languages with only two genders, plus Turkish which doesn't have a grammatical gender.
No Germanic languages, where it would arguably be far more useful due to multiple genders and gender pronouns.

Re:Languages

[ChunderDownunder]

Gotta start somewhere.

Latin had 3 genders but Asturian in northern Spain is one of the few Romance languages that preserves neuter.

Re:Languages

[Megol]

They are perhaps doing the easy ones first?

Re:Languages

[hawk]

neuter is also quite common in Vetrinarian . . . :)

hawk

What happens...

[Stormy Dragon]

If you type in "Nothing's wrong" and do an English -> English translation?

To English???

[e3m4n]

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.

Trans late

[bobstreo]

German is very problematic when translated. MasculineFeminine/Neuter Der/Die/Das

Here's a "for Dummies" link:

https://www.dummies.com/langua...

Re:Trans late

[110010001000]

We won the war so we don't need to read your link.

Re:Gender

[110010001000]

Back in MY day, there were only 12.

This is purely PR

[lucasnate1]

This problem already exists with languages that have two forms of 2nd person (dignified and personal). In these cases, google just outputs one case and allows you to click on it in order to get the other. Of course, this interface is less sexy for the brave couch activists of the internet, and therefore a new interface must be invented.

I really think that in the future, most of our gender dramas would be remembered the same way that we remember church officials arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Re:This is purely PR

[azcoyote]

Yeah, I often have trouble with Google translate for that reason. When translating English to Spanish, it tends to prefer the formal 2nd person, which is usually not what I am looking for. Of course, there's further complications with the fact that some localities use different forms for formal/informal; I believe this difference also exists in Portuguese between Portugal and Brazil.

Re:This is purely PR

[AmiMoJo]

It was misleading. It would give a translation that included gender when the original did not, and someone who didn't understand the original language at all would have no way of knowing if that was the case or not. In fact most people would not even ask the question.

The real fix is to make Google Translate understand context properly. Human translators can usually infer gender from context or other statements in the text, but machine translation doesn't seem to be that clever.

Re:Gender

[nyet]

12? There a many many more!

http://genderfluidsupport.tumb...

There was no gender problem

[uldics]

We have come to a rather ridiculous stance regarding genders and language. Now we are living inside a small rectangle and shooting at anyone sticking a word outside. Words have multiple meanings. Sometimes he means masculine, sometimes not any, sometimes both. Language is not some Javascript where 0 is never 0,5. If you are unable to present or read context, please do not push your squareheadedness onto everyone else. Go, read a book and enrich your interpersonal skills.

Re: It's the wurst

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody uses Google for porn anymore, dipshit. Bing it.

oddities about gender pronouns

[liquid_schwartz]

I think to me the funniest thing about gender pronouns is that the those who want to play dress up as the opposite sex *want* to be called 'they'. That's hilarious to me because it was a slur when I was in school as it implied multiple personalities. Now they ask for it, though I guess it still is multiple personalities so maybe it's the most accurate.

Re:oddities about gender pronouns

[Gonoff]

... it was a slur when I was in school as it implied multiple personalities.

When did you go to school? That has been valid usage since at least the time of Shakespeare.

Re:oddities about gender pronouns

[Megol]

You seem confused on several levels. Are you referring to transvestites and crossdressers in general? Or do you think transsexuals want to "play dress up" (some think that)? And do you really think "they" is the preferred pronoun for these groups? I'd say all these things are very wrong.

Re:oddities about gender pronouns

[liquid_schwartz]

... it was a slur when I was in school as it implied multiple personalities.

When did you go to school? That has been valid usage since at least the time of Shakespeare.

Referring to yourself, a single person, as 'them' or 'they' is not what I'd call traditional usage.

Re:oddities about gender pronouns

[Gonoff]

Shakespere is pretty well esconced in history.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.html

Pronouns are hard to translate

[aberglas]

Indonesian does not have words for Brother vs Sister, but it does have words for Older Sibling and Yongger Sibbling. So how do you translate that? For a machine, I would do it literally, so the reader can make sense of it. The last thing I want is alternate Brother / Sister which not only looses the meaning but is downright confusing if they are referring to the same individual.

Re:Pronouns are hard to translate

[bursch-X]

Japanese has different words for older brother/younger brother and older sister/younger sister.

It's really awkward when I have to refer to the sister of my son's violin teacher, because they're twins, and I really don't know which one popped out first.

Re:Pronouns are hard to translate

[Megol]

But you don't have to specify: "bror" is simply a "brother" and "søster" is simply a "sister".
(OB Windows complaint: why doesn't the old ALT+#number shortcuts work in Windows 10? "Had" to install Norsk to be able to write the Ø)

Re:Pronouns are hard to translate

[ncc74656]

(OB Windows complaint: why doesn't the old ALT+#number shortcuts work in Windows 10? "Had" to install Norsk to be able to write the Ø)

Works for me. Alt-0252 produces ü, for instance. The Character Map app even still shows "Keystroke: Alt+0216" in the lower right corner when I clicked on Ø (which I typed in).

Could it be a localization difference in Windows? US keyboards don't provide any other way to enter non-ASCII characters, so if they'd taken that capability away, you'd be stuck copying and pasting from Character Map (which I still do sometimes anyway if I need a character for which I don't know the code offhand).

New moonshots

[iamacat]

Forget about curing cancer or colonizing Mars, the crowning achievment of a Sillicon Valley giant today is gender options in translation.

Re:Gender neurtral? FAIL

[Gonoff]

Alternatively, you could use a form that has been around longer than the USA...

"They are a doctor."

Re:Gender neurtral? FAIL

[Megol]

Think of this as a quick fix until AI have progressed enough to translate well.... Any year now...

huh?

[cascadingstylesheet]

So if the source language allows neuter, but the target language requires a gender, it will give both possible translations?

That's actually ... kinda useful.

Dang, I was prepared to be all outraged one way or another ;)