谷歌翻譯被說性別歧視？這事真沒你想的那麼大

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.

谷歌正致力於減少翻譯工具中的性別歧視情況。不久前，谷歌因爲翻譯結果中自動將代詞譯爲男性代詞，被指控爲性別歧視。

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.

未來，從英語翻成法語、意大利語、葡萄牙語或者西班牙語時，即使是非常性別化的詞彙比如“強壯”或者“美麗”，呈現的結果也會同時帶有男性和女性代詞。以前，谷歌的算法會在翻譯時自動選擇男性代詞。

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

另外，谷歌翻譯在土耳其語到英語的翻譯中會提供具有性別特徵的短語或句子。

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.”  

最新消息來自兩位斯坦福大學教授，二人指出，谷歌的人工智能翻譯以前在把西語新聞翻成英語時，會把描寫女性的句子自動切換爲“他說”或“他寫道”。

“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.”

詹姆斯和隆達教授在論文《人工智能是性別歧視者兼種族歧視者——是時候矯正了》中寫到：“有缺陷的算法能通過反饋漏洞放大偏見。每次翻譯程序自動翻譯成‘他說’，就增加了網上男性代詞的相關使用頻率，這對性別平等來說又造成了重重障礙。”

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

谷歌方面表示這個缺陷是“無意中複製了早已存在的性別歧視”，翻譯都是從網上已有的例子中學習的。

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.

不過谷歌承認了問題，也在努力解決問題，併發布計劃，未來將擴大具有性別特徵的翻譯到更多的語言中去，同時要在IOS和安卓系統上發佈該功能。

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.

谷歌稱正在思考要如何解決翻譯中的無性別問題，但是此前並未給出方案。

（翻譯：阿忙）