Google Translate Tackling Gender Bias

Source: Google

Google Translate will now show gender-specific translations for certain languages. This is in effort to reduce gender bias. Previously, Google Translate would only show one translation for words that could either be feminine or masculine in nature.

Google has been promoting fairness in AI and machine learning, as demonstrated recently by its initiative to remove gendered pronouns from Gmail’s Smart Compose feature.

Currently, the gender-specific translations are only available for translating single words from English to languages like French, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish.

Turkish to English is the only pairing that provides both translations for sentences. Google gives an example (see pic above) in which typing “o bir doktor” in Turkish will turn up both “she is a doctor” and “he is a doctor.”

For now, this feature is only available on browsers like Chrome and Firefox, but will eventually be available on Android and iOS devices.

Google is working to bring support for more languages as well.

Share this post:

Comment what you think!