Google translate to reduce gender bias, to promote equally

NP NEWS 24 ONLINE – Google has taken a step towards reducing gender bias on the Google Translate website. In the past, when a word could be translated in either a masculine or feminine form, only one translation was provided, and because Google Translate learns from existing examples of translations, biases in those samples can be transferred to Translate’s responses. That could sometimes result in words like “strong” or “doctor” leading to masculine translations while words like “nurse” or “beautiful” could produce feminine translations.

Now, however, for certain languages, Translate will offer both a masculine and a feminine translation when either might be appropriate.

“Over the course of this year, there’s been an effort across Google to promote fairness and reduce bias in machine learning,” product manager James Kuczmarski said in a blog post.

Up to now, the translated program provided only one translation for a query, often choosing the masculine word for terms like “doctor”, and the feminine word for “nurse”, for example.

Google said it was planning to extend gender-specific translations to more languages, “and address gender bias in features like query auto-complete. And we’re already thinking about how to address non-binary gender in translations, though it’s not part of this initial launch,” Kuczmarski added.

Now Google Translate on the web will offer both a feminine and masculine translation for a single word–such as “surgeon”–when translating from English into French, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish. Plus the site says that when translating phrases from Turkish to English, such as o bir doktor in Turkish, you’ll know get “she is a doctor” and “he is a doctor” as gender-specific translations.

In the future, feminine and masculine translations will be coming to other languages as well as the Google Translate apps on Android and iOS. And Google says it’s also aiming to tackle gender bias in other features, such as query auto-complete, as well as thinking about how to address non-binary gender in translations.