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

Posted by BeauHD on from the two-is-better-than-one dept.

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.

12 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. Good! by azcoyote · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    Incipiamus, fratres, servire Domino Deo, quia hucusque vix vel parum in nullo profecimus.
    1. Re:Good! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    2. Re:Good! by Pseudonym · · Score: 2

      Dyirbal has four.

      --
      sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
    3. Re:Good! by azcoyote · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.
    4. Re: Good! by azcoyote · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.
    5. Re: Good! by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

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

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  2. It's actually kind of annoying by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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."
  3. Google Translate didn't learn anything by Spy+Handler · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. To English??? by e3m4n · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  5. This is purely PR by lucasnate1 · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    --
    Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
  6. Re:Trans late by 110010001000 · · Score: 3, Funny

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

  7. New moonshots by iamacat · · Score: 2, Interesting

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