Google Translate Is Reducing Gender Bias During Translations

• Google is working towards making Translate free from gender bias.
• The changes will reflect on both Google Translate and Google’s search engine.
• The new update will offer both feminine and masculine translations when using the tool.

If you use the Google Translate a lot, you may have noticed that the tool is often biased towards the masculine gender when offering translations. Google is working towards changing that with the tool now offering both feminine and masculine versions of translations instead of offering just one translation.

Prior to the update, only one translation was provided by Google Translate. While words like strong and miner inclined the tool to use masculine translations while words like beautiful and dancer would lead to feminine translations. Going forward, whenever the tool finds it appropriate to use stay gender neutral it will offer both translations.

Image Courtesy of Google

The new update to Google Translate will work when users translate single words in French, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish to English. According to Google “You’ll also get both translations when translating phrases and sentences from Turkish to English. For example, if you type “o bir doktor” in Turkish, you’ll now get “she is a doctor” and “he is a doctor” as the gender-specific translations.”

Translate is not the first tool that Google has tweaked to be more gender neutral. Gmail’s Smart Compose tool received a few changes that removed gender pronouns out to make sure there was no gender bias. The company had tried a number of solutions prior to removing the pronouns outright, but none of them were as effective.

Changing how Google Translate works and the recent changes to Gmail are part of a collective effort that Google is taking to be more inclusive and reduce bias in its machine learning. The number of languages that Translate has been modified for will increase over time. The changes will be implemented on Android, iOS, the official website as well as Google Search with its integrated translate tool.

What do you think about the changes coming to Google Translate? Let us know in the comments below. Let us know in the comments, and don’t forget to visit our Facebook and Twitter page for more news like this.