Google has just released an update to its flagship translation service, Google Translate. This update is important for one reason which is related to gender bias. There have been reports that Google Translate translations have a gender bias. This is because when a user translates from some other language, the translation automatically comes with a male in reference. For example, if you search for “o bir doktor” in Turkish and translate it into English. You will get a result in English as “He is a Doctor” which is clear bias if the user is a female.
Now, you would argue that the translation demands that it should be with a male in reference. That is not the case here as the above translation is gender neutral. This is just one example and there are various examples of such gender bias in different languages. Therefore, Google has quickly acted upon this and given a possible solution to this issue. The solution is that Google Translate will show two translations for such gender-neutral statements. The translations will be shown in both masculine and feminine languages from now on.
So, for the above example, you will now get two results of translations. One will be in masculine and another in the feminine. The results will be “He is a Doctor” and “She is a Doctor” respectively. Now, this should fix the issue of gender bias in Google Translate on a greater extent. Google has also issued a statement on this which can be read below
“Over the course of this year, there’s been an effort across Google to promote fairness and reduce bias in machine learning, Now you’ll get both a feminine and masculine translation for a single word — like ‘surgeon’ — when translating from English into French, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish. And we’re already thinking about how to address non-binary gender in translations, though it’s not part of this initial launch” Google Translate product manager James Kuczmarski said.