Saying ‘no’ to gender bias

For those of us who have used Google Translate, it is a well known fact that the smart assistant would only show one translation for words that could either have a feminine or masculine form. For example, translation of the word doctor would automatically refer to males, while words like beautiful and nurse would skew feminine. This has changed. In an effort to reduce gender bias in its translations, Google Translate will now show gender-specific translations for some languages. Now, Google Translate will show both feminine and masculine translations for words, but in selected languages only. The company had also announced the decision to remove gendered pronouns from Gmail’s Smart Compose feature. Currently, the gender-specific translations are only available for translating single words from English to romance languages like French, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish. Turkish to English is the only language pair that provides both translations for sentences.

The new feature has been introduced in accordance with the company’s mission to promote fairness in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The feature currently only works in browsers like Chrome and Firefox, and will eventually be available on iOS and Android. Google might  introduce support for more languages in near future.