68 of the false translations were marked as “verified” by Google. In their vast majority, the errors had to do with feminine forms converted to their masculine equivalent. In my experiment, 182 translations out of 440 turned out to be false. But “the developer” translates to “le développeur” and all the sentences I tried translated into the masculine, including the phrase “the developer is a woman”. Over two years after the changes were deployed, “developer” is correctly translated into French both in the masculine form as “le développeur” and in the feminine as “la développeuse”. However, it is unclear whether such efforts were made in earnest. In 2018, Google introduced a feature that alerted users that some words could be gender-specific when translating from English. Only in May 2020 did the Association for Computational Linguistics, a large professional body, tell reviewers of their annual conference that they could not reject a paper solely because it was about a language other than English. Several experts I talked to agreed that the community of researchers working on machine translation was not very concerned about non-English languages. “The majority of nouns in English are gender-neutral: so, when translating the feminine term for ‘nurse’ from a gender-inflected language to English, the gender is ‘lost’ in the translation to the bridging language,” the Google spokesperson added. The most common language used as bridge is English.” Language bridging in translation means that to translate from X to Y a third language is introduced (E) based on the existence of bilingual data to translate X to E and then E to Y. The way to enable these translations is by using a technique called ‘bridging’. Stereotypes sneak into translations because Google optimizes translations for English.Ī Google spokesperson told AlgorithmWatch that “translating between language pairs requires high volumes of bilingual data that often don’t exist for all language pairs. In some cases, especially when nearby words contain feminine forms, Google correctly translates gender-inflected forms. This experiment might not reflect what Google Translate shows when translating web pages or longer texts. The experiment’s code and data are available online. For instance, “l'insegnante” in Italian designates both a female and a male teacher.) (When Google correctly translated a feminine occupation, it was often because the target language’s word was not gender-inflected. “Kierowniczka” (Polish for female director) was correctly translated in all four target languages, although “die Chefin”, “la capa”, “la jefa” and “la cheffe” were wrongly translated to their masculine forms. From French to Spanish for instance, “la vendeuse” was correctly translated to “la vendedora” and “le vendeur” to “el vendedor”.Įrrors are not systematic, showing that they can be fixed. ![]() In my list, shop assistant was best translated by Google, with 33 correct translations out of 40. “Der Krankenpfleger” (the male nurse in German) becomes “l’infirmière” (the female nurse) in French. “Die Präsidentin” (the female president) is rendered to “il presidente” in Italian, although the correct translation is “la presidente”. In many cases, Google changed the gender of the word in a grossly stereotypical way. Together, these languages are natively spoken by three in four citizens of the European Union. I analyzed 440 translation pairs to and from German, Italian, Polish, Spanish and French. In an experiment, I translated 11 occupations from one gender-inflected language to another. Female historians are simply removed from the text. The phrase “vier Historikerinnen und Historiker” (four male and female historians) is rendered as “cuatro historiadores” (four male historians) in Spanish, with similar results in Italian, French and Polish. If you were to read a story about male and female historians translated by Google, you might be forgiven for overlooking the females in the group.
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