谷歌翻译被说性别歧视？这事真没你想的那么大

Google is working to reduce gender bias in its Google Translate tool after it was accused of sexism for automatically translating sentences to include masculine pronouns.

谷歌正致力于减少翻译工具中的性别歧视情况。不久前，谷歌因为翻译结果中自动将代词译为男性代词，被指控为性别歧视。

Translations from English into French, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish will also now provide a feminine alternative as well as a masculine one for gendered words such as “strong” or “beautiful.” In the past, Google's algorithm had to choose between masculine or feminine when translating a word - automatically defaulting to masculine in many instances.

未来，从英语翻成法语、意大利语、葡萄牙语或者西班牙语时，即使是非常性别化的词汇比如“强壮”或者“美丽”，呈现的结果也会同时带有男性和女性代词。以前，谷歌的算法会在翻译时自动选择男性代词。

Additionally, the tool will offer gender-specific translations for phrases and sentences from Turkish to English.

另外，谷歌翻译在土耳其语到英语的翻译中会提供具有性别特征的短语或句子。

The update comes after two Stanford University professors pointed out that the artificial intelligence used by Google Translate was converting news articles written in Spanish to English by changing phrases referring to women into “he said” or “he wrote.”

最新消息来自两位斯坦福大学教授，二人指出，谷歌的人工智能翻译以前在把西语资讯翻成英语时，会把描写女性的句子自动切换为“他说”或“他写道”。

“Flawed algorithms can amplify biases through feedback loops,” professors James Zou and Londa Schiebinger wrote in a paper titled “AI can be sexist and racist - it's time to make it fair.” “Each time a translation program defaults to ‘he said,’ it increases the relative frequency of the masculine pronoun on the web - potentially reversing hard-won advances toward equality.”

詹姆斯和隆达教授在论文《人工智能是性别歧视者兼种族歧视者——是时候矫正了》中写到：“有缺陷的算法能通过反馈漏洞放大偏见。每次翻译程序自动翻译成‘他说’，就增加了网上男性代词的相关使用频率，这对性别平等来说又造成了重重障碍。”

According to Google, the flaw, which “inadvertently replicated gender biases that already existed,” was learned from already-translated examples online.

谷歌方面表示这个缺陷是“无意中复制了早已存在的性别歧视”，翻译都是从网上已有的例子中学习的。

After acknowledging and remedying the issue, the tech giant announced its plans to extend the gender-specific translations to more languages as well as launch it on its other Translate surfaces such as IOS and Android.

不过谷歌承认了问题，也在努力解决问题，并发布计划，未来将扩大具有性别特征的翻译到更多的语言中去，同时要在IOS和安卓系统上发布该功能。

The company also said it was thinking about how to address non-binary gender in translations - but did not have immediate plans on how to do so.

谷歌称正在思考要如何解决翻译中的无性别问题，但是此前并未给出方案。