Google Translate and other popular translation platforms often provide unintentionally sexist translations where, among other things, “doctors” are men and “teachers” are women. The reason why has to do with a complex mix of algorithms, linguistics, and source materials.

Google Translate is the world’s most popular web translation platform, but one Stanford University researcher says it doesn’t really understand sex and gender. Londa Schiebinger, who runs Stanford’s Gendered Innovations project, says Google’s choice of source databases causes a statistical bias toward male nouns and verbs in translation. In a paper on gender and natural language processing, Schiebinger offers convincing evidence that the source texts used with Google’s translation algorithms lead to unintentional sexism.

Machine Translation & Gender

In a peer-reviewed case study published in 2013, Schiebinger illustrated that Google Translate has a tendency to turn gender-neutral English words (such as “the,” or occupational names such as “professor” and “doctor”) into the male form in other languages once the word is translated. However, certain gender-neutral English words are translated into the female form… but only when they comply with certain gender stereotypes. For instance, the gender-neutral English terms “a defendant” and “a nurse” translate into the German “ein Angeklagter” and “eine Krankenschwester.” Defendant translates as male, but nurse auto-translates into female.

Where Google Translate really trips up, Schiebinger claims, is in the lack of context for gender-neutral words in other languages when translated into English. Schiebinger ran an article about her work in Spanish-language newspaper El Pais into English through Google Translate and rival platform Systran. Both Google Translate and Systran translated the gender-neutral Spanish words “suyo” and “dice” as “his” and “he said,” despite the fact that Schiebinger is female. More.

See: Fast Company

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