The move comes amid criticism that Google Translate often showed up only masculine names when it converted text to another language. “Over the course of this year, there’s been an effort across Google to promote fairness and reduce bias in machine learning,” James Kuczmarski, Google Translate’s Product Manager, said in a blog post.
“Historically, it has provided only one translation for a query, even if the translation could have either a feminine or masculine form,” Kuczmarski said in the post.
Google has lately been on a mission to promote fairness in AI (artificial intelligence) and machine learning. This could be seen in its recently introduced initiative to remove gendered pronouns from Gmail’s Smart Compose feature.
The company says it also has plans with regards to addressing non-binary gender in translations as well as gender bias in other Google products like search auto-complete.
What does Google plan to do?
In the blog post, Kuczmarski said, “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. You’ll also get both translations when translating phrases and sentences from Turkish to English.”
So, for instance, if you type “o bir doktor” in Turkish, Google Translate will now show “she is a doctor” and “he is a doctor” as the gender-specific translations. Google
Currently, the gender-specific translations are only available for translating single words from English to languages such as French, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish. Turkish to English is the only language pair that provides both translations for sentences.
Moreover, the feature currently works only in browsers like Chrome and Firefox. Google said it eventually plans to make the feature available on iOS and Android, and that it’s also working to bring support for more languages as well.