Google Translate Learns To Reduce Gender Bias (cnet.com) 150
Google is working to make Translate less gender-biased by giving both a feminine and masculine translation for a single word. "Previously, the service defaulted to the masculine options," reports CNET. "The new function is available when translating words from English into French, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish and Spanish. It provides a similar function when translating into English." From the report: Google Translate learns from the hundreds of millions of already-translated examples available on the internet, creating an opportunity for the tool to incorporate the gender bias it encountered online, according to a Google blog post announcing the change. With the update, Google Translate will present translations for both genders. For example, if you translate "o bir doktor" from Turkish to English, you'll see "she is a doctor" and "he is a doctor" in the translation box. In November, Google also made Gmail's Smart Compose technology stop suggesting gender-based pronouns. Previously, it defaulted to masculine pronouns.
Good! (Score:5, Informative)
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Only 'both'? Language is 'transphobic', words need 56+ genders!
Plus one more for 'motion towards'.
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Re: Good! (Score:1)
3 genders for substantives
-feminine
-masculine
-neutral for things only
Re: Good! (Score:1)
Well, the proper pronoun for neuter is "it". However, people who claim to have no gender like to refer to themselves in the third person plural, because they also have a turd in their pocket that they also want have acknowledged. Thus, instead of "my" they say "our", or instead of "I" they say "we".
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Dyirbal [wikipedia.org] has four.
Re: Good! (Score:1)
Re: Good! (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the confusion is that a noun class != gender. In many languages noun classes tend to follow gendered lines, but usually not exclusively or even always predictably. In some cases this practice can lead to cultural associations that see a particular object as "male" or "female"--such as in medieval Latin the Church (ecclesia) is pretty consistently seen as female. In other cases, however, it's purely semantic and people don't necessarily even think of the object as "having" a gender even though its noun is gendered. Hence in Spanish pan ("bread") is masculine, but I don't recall ever seeing it treated as something intrinsically male.
I would wager that it's English's neuter that has actually caused the political strife over gendered language today. The tendency to see all non-living nouns as neuter has made it so that the gender of masculine and feminine nouns has become associated more closely with the actual sex of the object being described. Accordingly, it becomes natural for some to assume that if a masculine word is used about something (e.g. God) then it implies that the object is male, even though grammatically that is not necessarily the case. I've heard people with other languages object that this is not an issue in their language, and I think it's because these other languages do not treat all non-living objects as neuter. For example, the German pronoun man ("one") is seen as avoiding such a problem because it is different from the word Mann ("man"). But really man is still masculine grammatically. The real reason it is not thought of by some as offensive is simply because in German it's common for non-sexed/non-living objects to be masculine or feminine grammatically.
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It's history more than language that creates the issues in English. To use your example of God, the primary religions of Europe all have a male god who made the first man in his image. The first woman was made to keep him company and provide him with children, which pretty much set up the model for how people thought about women and feminine things in general - there to serve men.
That's why machines are usually referred to as female, e.g. ships. They were, until comparatively recently, created by, controlle
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Alternatively you can interpret machines being female because they're precious, valuable, and cherished by those around them. Your problem is that your entirely worldview and thought process always starts with the same foregone conclusion and simply works backwards to invent justifications for it from there.
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Alternatively you can interpret machines being female because they're precious, valuable, and cherished by those around them.
You can, but that is also a rather outdated gender stereotype. I'd expect you of all people to know that, having complained about women being "just as bad or worse than men" before.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you mean well with that statement, but unfortunately the same argument was used to "protect" women from roles they were thought unsuited to, such as policing. It's also a bit misandrist in that it seems to imply that women are more deserving of or perhaps more inherently precious
Re: Good! (Score:2)
They were inherently more valuable. That's obviously changed in recent times.
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It's also a bit misandrist in that it seems to imply that women are more deserving of or perhaps more inherently precious and valuable and cherished.
It is not remotely misandrist to understand that women are more valuable. In natural conditions, where survival is paramount, one woman is worth dozens of men - whihc means the woman stays alive, but resource management means the surplus men are either culled or cast out.
In extremis, I understand that I will be terminated long before a female. That's just how it is.
Which is all the stranger in these strange times, that a large number of females wish to emulate the weaker of the 2 sexes.
Meanwhile the
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In natural conditions
Yeah, but we aren't in natural conditions. Appealing to the nature of prehistoric mankind as justification for behaviour today isn't a very compelling argument.
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In natural conditions
Yeah, but we aren't in natural conditions. Appealing to the nature of prehistoric mankind as justification for behaviour today isn't a very compelling argument.
You sound like the people who accidentally kill their cats because they force them to be vegan. Because you don't need to pay any attention to nature, amirite? It's not compelling.
And you slippery sloped me there. It is pretty obvious that we aren't in hunter gatherer mode any more for the most part.
But I say that there are women in parts of the world who are being horribly mistreated, while the west is losing thier shit because of abysmally stupid things like the gender of inanimate objects. Forced cli
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Come on Ol, taking it to an absurd extreme and then whataboutism?
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Come on Ol, taking it to an absurd extreme and then whataboutism?
Negative. I am in no way trying to accuse you or any other Western feminist of being a hypocrite. Merely that we belong to nature, not the other way around, and that modern feminism is not being hypocritical, that it merely has a different agenda than what is stated. That is not hypocrisy. That means that for some reason modern feminists accept a lot of terrible mistreatment of women, while worrying about Gender in description of non-living things. That is completely bizzare to me. If there is a logical ex
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There's no such thing as "whataboutism". That's nothing more than a bad faith silencing tactic from the same family of fallacies as loaded questions. Even moreso when your entire shtick is claiming a moral highground and particular belief system and someone is pointing out the invalidity of those claims.
Whataboutism is shouting that you're egging someone's house because you oppose all animal cruelty and meat eating and then crying foul when someone points out that you spent your morning kicking puppies and
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the primary religions of Europe all have a male god who made the first man in his image
My pagan friends would probably slap you. At best, those are secondary religions. Filthy imports, bah!
It's history more than language that creates the issues in English.
What creates issues in English is the bizarre intermediate state between keeping Indo-European grammatical gender and ditching it.
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You're partly right. In Christianity, both men and women are explicitly created in the image of God. It's the first story of creation (Genesis 1) that talks about this, and in that story both man and woman are created at the same time and both are clearly stated to be in the image of God. Only the second story of creation shows woman being created second, but even there it makes no claim that woman is somehow lesser. It does not state that woman is created to serve man, but that woman is a suitable helper o
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Eh?
courage is der Mut in German, that is a masculine noun.
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To use your example of God, the primary religions of Europe all have a male god who made the first man in his image.
Which religions are those? They sure aren't any of the Judaism-based religions.
26 And God said: 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.' 27 And God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.
The text goes back and forth between singular and plural, but it's pretty clear that both male and female humans are created "in the image of God".
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You literally copied the gendered pronouns, and then ignored them and the semicolon that separates clauses based upon the lame excuse that
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You miss the point of language. Hebrew, like most languages, tends to use male as the default, so "them" is still masculine but by context it includes both male and female. In the same way, the singular "him" is masculine because it refers back to "man," which is masculine, but "man" is descriptive of both male and female. Likewise, the word "homo" in Latin (the source of "human") is not neuter but masculine, but even in Latin it refers to a species that is considered to be both male and female. To my under
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You miss the point that citing one particular English translation of an ancient text, and doing it badly at that, does nothing to inform concerning the beliefs of "the primary religions of Europe."
The language is what it is. The philosophy behind the language is not proven by it.
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In some cases this practice can lead to cultural associations that see a particular object as "male" or "female"--such as in medieval Latin the Church (ecclesia) is pretty consistently seen as female.
Accordingly, it becomes natural for some to assume that if a masculine word is used about something (e.g. God) then it implies that the object is male, even though grammatically that is not necessarily the case.
Neither of these cases have anything to do with noun class. The typological relationship that the New Testament sets up is that God is the Father (read: paterfamilias, for those acquainted with Roman legal structures) who has a fully grown Son (Jesus Christ) who is coming to claim the estate of his Father as the legal executor. In the process, he is using his legal authority to graft humanity into the family. This is most commonly expressed as a relationship of legal adoption (through baptism). But it is al
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I would wager that it's English's neuter that has actually caused the political strife over gendered language today. The tendency to see all non-living nouns as neuter has made it so that the gender of masculine and feminine nouns has become associated more closely with the actual sex of the object being described. Accordingly, it becomes natural for some to assume that if a masculine word is used about something (e.g. God) then it implies that the object is male, even though grammatically that is not necessarily the case. I've heard people with other languages object that this is not an issue in their language, and I think it's because these other languages do not treat all non-living objects as neuter. For example, the German pronoun man ("one") is seen as avoiding such a problem because it is different from the word Mann ("man"). But really man is still masculine grammatically. The real reason it is not thought of by some as offensive is simply because in German it's common for non-sexed/non-living objects to be masculine or feminine grammatically.
Nope. We have the exact same problem in German, where we have all these gendered nouns. Incidentally, English hasn't completely forgotten those genders, even though they are no longer part of the grammar. There are lots of things you think of as male or female (so use "she" or "he"), usually (or at least in the examples I'm currently thinking of) the same as the French grammatical gender, which is often opposite the German one. So the moon is often a "she", the sun a "he" (German does it the other way arou
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"Das Mädchen"
Re:Good! (Score:4, Interesting)
Interesting. Wikipedia says:
The language is best known for its system of noun classes, numbering four in total. They tend to be divided among the following semantic lines:
I - most animate objects, men
II - women, water, fire, violence, and exceptional animals[7]
III - edible fruit and vegetables
IV - miscellaneous (includes things not classifiable in the first three)
I guess we should be more politically correct in English for those of us who consider themselves to be "edible fruit and vegetables."
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I guess we should be more politically correct in English for those of us who consider themselves to be "edible fruit and vegetables."
This is a very common misunderstanding of what gender expression is. People who subscribe to that model of gender think that gender is performative, i.e. you can't be edible fruit because you can't live as edible fruit. You can live as a man or a woman or something else on that spectrum though, by altering your appearance and behaviour etc.
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This is a very common misunderstanding of what gender expression is. People who subscribe to that model of gender think that gender is performative, i.e. you can't be edible fruit because you can't live as edible fruit. You can live as a man or a woman or something else on that spectrum though, by altering your appearance and behaviour etc.
To mangle an old quote; Gender is objective, anatomical, and binary, all else is the work of Man."
Re: Good! (Score:2)
You can live as a man or a woman or something else on that spectrum though, by altering your appearance and behaviour etc.
Yeah, right. You can live as black by growing dreadlocks and speaking Ebonics.
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Interesting. Wikipedia says:
The language is best known for its system of noun classes, numbering four in total. They tend to be divided among the following semantic lines: I - most animate objects, men II - women, water, fire, violence, and exceptional animals[7]
Hmm, sounds "sexist" right out of the box. Men are living things, women are uncontrollable forces of nature.
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The very rare, yet still real hermaphrodite makes the count 3.
2 shall ye not count to, unless ye continue on to 3. 5 is way out!
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Even intersex (hermaphroditism) is not really another gender, but a mixed expression of the two. This is because gender is not a purely static, unrelated absolute, as though "male" were definable in its own terms without reference to "female." After all, "male" is that which is oriented toward mating with "female," and vice versa. Even before all of our cultural assumptions about gender, there is a biological distinction that has everything to do with mutual relationship. Intersex, in contrast, is not one c
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You wish there were only 56 genders.
http://genderfluidsupport.tumblr.com/gender [tumblr.com]
Gender Master List [heavily abridged - Ed.]
Apconsugender: a gender where you know what it isn't, but not what it is; the gender is hiding itself from you
Caelgender: a gender which shares qualities with outer space or has the aesthetic of space, stars, nebulas, etc.
Collgender: the feeling of having too many genders simultaneously to describe each one
Demi-smoke: A transcendental, spiritual gender roughly drifting to other genders that are unable to be foreseen and understood, shrouded in darkness within your inner visual. Elevating through mystery. Caused by a lack of inner interpretation and dark emotional states.
Hydrogender: a gender which shares qualities with water
Juxera: a feminine gender similar to girl, but on a separate plane and off to itself
Magigender: a gender that is mostly gender and the rest is something else
Perigender: identifying with a gender but not as a gender
Surgender: having a gender that is 100% one gender but with more of another gender added on top of that
Vapogender: a gender that sort of feels like smoke; can be seen on a shallow level but once you go deeper, it disappears and you are left with no gender and only tiny wisps of what you thought it was
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It is important for it to give both in cases where both are equally valid.
I agree, but lets not make it so verbose. And don't forget neutral. So I propose:
s/h/it is going to hit the fan.
So Romeo and Juliet turn into (Score:1)
It's actually kind of annoying (Score:5, Interesting)
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Pronouns are hard to translate (Score:2)
Indonesian does not have words for Brother vs Sister, but it does have words for Older Sibling and Yongger Sibbling. So how do you translate that? For a machine, I would do it literally, so the reader can make sense of it. The last thing I want is alternate Brother / Sister which not only looses the meaning but is downright confusing if they are referring to the same individual.
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It's really awkward when I have to refer to the sister of my son's violin teacher, because they're twins, and I really don't know which one popped out first.
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But you don't have to specify: "bror" is simply a "brother" and "søster" is simply a "sister".
(OB Windows complaint: why doesn't the old ALT+#number shortcuts work in Windows 10? "Had" to install Norsk to be able to write the Ø)
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Works for me. Alt-0252 produces ü, for instance. The Character Map app even still shows "Keystroke: Alt+0216" in the lower right corner when I clicked on Ø (which I typed in).
Could it be a localization difference in Windows? US keyboards don't provide any other way to enter non-ASCII characters, so if they'd taken that capability away, you'd be stuck copying
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newsradio macho business donkey wrestler [youtube.com]
This show was excellent. They had this idea before these translators existed.
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Google translate isn't very good with Japanese anyway. So far I have only had success with technical documents and not really with anything where gender of people would matter. For such a purpose Atlas [fujitsu.com] does a much better job at translating from Japanese to English. It's based on a dictionary lookup, meaning it has awareness of grammar and a whole different kind of context awareness than Google translate. This means you can actually teach it new words and by selecting grammar rules (name of male person or ad
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The bigger issue with translating Japanese is that it often rephrases things to be personal. Instead of "a bug was found in app 1.0" it comes out as "I found a bug in app 1.0".
Google Translate has got a lot better at this, but now it tends to err on the side of being impersonal. The only way to fix it is to understand the context of the statement, but they don't seem to have the ability to do that yet.
Re: It's actually kind of annoying (Score:2)
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That's because Google is taking words to be literal, instead of including them into proper sentences when punctuation is used in many cases. Compare the differences between Atlas, Bing and Google translations. Atlas and Bing are fare more likely to be correct because they're paying attention to the grammatical rules.
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Google Translate didn't learn anything (Score:5, Insightful)
It's programmers at Google who made the changes. TFT makes it sound like Google Translate became sentient, then became woke (in the social justice sense), and came to the conclusion, all on its own, that defaulting to masculine gender is sexist/misogynist/bad.
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Re: It's the wurst (Score:1)
Nobody uses Google for porn anymore, dipshit. Bing it.
Languages (Score:2)
The new function is available when translating words from English into French, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish and Spanish.
So four Romance languages with only two genders, plus Turkish which doesn't have a grammatical gender.
No Germanic languages, where it would arguably be far more useful due to multiple genders and gender pronouns.
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Gotta start somewhere.
Latin had 3 genders but Asturian in northern Spain is one of the few Romance languages that preserves neuter.
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neuter is also quite common in Vetrinarian . . . :)
hawk
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They are perhaps doing the easy ones first?
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12? There a many many more!
http://genderfluidsupport.tumb... [tumblr.com]
What happens... (Score:2, Funny)
If you type in "Nothing's wrong" and do an English -> English translation?
To English??? (Score:5, Interesting)
I get looking up a word like devil and getting back both diablo and diabla. But if I type in
SienÃra es la diabla
and translate back to english, I better not get both
The woman is the devil
The man is the devil
That phrase in latin languages has absolute gender already assigned.
Trans late (Score:2)
German is very problematic when translated. MasculineFeminine/Neuter Der/Die/Das
Here's a "for Dummies" link:
https://www.dummies.com/langua... [dummies.com]
Re:Trans late (Score:4, Funny)
This is purely PR (Score:5, Funny)
This problem already exists with languages that have two forms of 2nd person (dignified and personal). In these cases, google just outputs one case and allows you to click on it in order to get the other. Of course, this interface is less sexy for the brave couch activists of the internet, and therefore a new interface must be invented.
I really think that in the future, most of our gender dramas would be remembered the same way that we remember church officials arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
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It was misleading. It would give a translation that included gender when the original did not, and someone who didn't understand the original language at all would have no way of knowing if that was the case or not. In fact most people would not even ask the question.
The real fix is to make Google Translate understand context properly. Human translators can usually infer gender from context or other statements in the text, but machine translation doesn't seem to be that clever.
There was no gender problem (Score:1, Flamebait)
oddities about gender pronouns (Score:2)
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... it was a slur when I was in school as it implied multiple personalities.
When did you go to school? That has been valid usage since at least the time of Shakespeare.
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... it was a slur when I was in school as it implied multiple personalities.
When did you go to school? That has been valid usage since at least the time of Shakespeare.
Referring to yourself, a single person, as 'them' or 'they' is not what I'd call traditional usage.
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Shakespere is pretty well esconced in history.
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.html
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You seem confused on several levels. Are you referring to transvestites and crossdressers in general? Or do you think transsexuals want to "play dress up" (some think that)? And do you really think "they" is the preferred pronoun for these groups? I'd say all these things are very wrong.
New moonshots (Score:3, Interesting)
Forget about curing cancer or colonizing Mars, the crowning achievment of a Sillicon Valley giant today is gender options in translation.
huh? (Score:2)
So if the source language allows neuter, but the target language requires a gender, it will give both possible translations?
That's actually ... kinda useful.
Dang, I was prepared to be all outraged one way or another ;)
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Alternatively, you could use a form that has been around longer than the USA...
"They are a doctor."
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Think of this as a quick fix until AI have progressed enough to translate well.... Any year now...