Google Translate updated to address gender bias

Google Translate has been updated to reduce gender bias from its results. The company announced that the service will now display feminine and masculine translations for some gender-neutral words to address gender bias. The Google Translate service is said to learn from “hundreds of millions of already-translated examples from the web” and even if a query had grammatical genders, it provided only one translation for it. Now, one will get translations in both the genders for a single word like for example, “surgeon”—when translating from English into French, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish. 

When translating phrases and sentences, one will also be displayed results in both masculine and feminine forms. For example, type “o bir doktor” in Turkish and Translate will show “she is a doctor” and “he is a doctor” as the gender-specific translations. Google says that gender-specific translations will be rolled out for more languages in the future and for the Translate service in other platforms like iOS and Android apps, along with the addressal of gender bias from even auto-complete suggestions. Google says, “we’re already thinking about how to address non-binary gender in translations, though it’s not part of this initial launch.”

Google Translate was recently updated for the web too and it got a responsive design with several new features. The service now features a responsive design, which means that it can dynamically adjust to the user’s screen size even when a browser window is stretched or resized. The service has also been updated with labelling and typography, which is said to make it easier to navigate within the service. Additionally, there are now labels to each saved translation to help find them easily. You can read more about the new updates in detail here. 

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