Google Translate bashed for sexism

Google Translate is used by over 200 million people daily and, according to boffins from Brazil, its AI-powered tongue twisting tends to deliver sexist results.

In a research paper distributed through pre-printer service ArXiv, "Assessing Gender Bias in Machine Translation – A Case Study with Google Translate," Marcelo Prates, Pedro Avelar, and Luis Lamb from Brazil's Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, explore how Google Translate renders gender pronouns in English from sentences written in a dozen different gender-neutral languages, The Register reports.

The researchers took jobs described in US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data and used them to construct sentences like "She is an engineer" and "He is an engineer" in languages like Chinese, Hungarian, Japanese and Turkish that use non-gendered pronouns.

They then ran the sentences through Google Translate, via API, to see how Google's language model assigned gendered pronouns in English and subsequently compared the ratio of female and male gendered pronouns to the expected ratio, based on actual gender-based job participation.

In theory, sentences describing a job that is predominantly female would be expected to be translated with female pronouns with approximately the same frequency, given that the translation model would be trained from data reflecting that baseline.

The results were not really surprising for a company that, by its own measurement, is only about 30 per cent female in an industry where women are underrepresented.