Bias in cloud translation API results

[Paddy Alton]

We use the cloud translation API to provide machine translations of our website from English into French and Spanish.

A contributor recently flagged the fact that in a list of her co-authors, all of whom are women, the job titles of some were rendered in the masculine form (e.g. two 'co-directors' became a 'co-directrice/co-directora' and a 'co-directeur/co-director' respectively).

The API results appear to be correct for those contributors who have names that are common for women in western Europe and default to the masculine form otherwise, so this appears to be a gender bias with a cultural aspect to it.

Obviously this is concerning to us. In the short term, it seems that returning both translations (so that our automated translation pipeline could flag potential ambiguities) is not supported. This would be a useful feature in my opinion, especially as there are names that are of ambiguous gender that we'd want to handle properly in future (in the current case, they are not of ambiguous gender).

In the meantime, if there is an alternative fix for this issue I'd be interested to hear about it.

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[Konstantin Savenkov]

Hi Paddy,

We are facing similar challenges when using Machine Translation for live chats and chatbots. We have developed certain tools to control and mitigate those biases for Google Translate (and other MT engines). You may drop by my session on this topic at GlobalSake (https://www.globalsakegrowth.com/) or just reach me directly at k...@inten.to

cheers,

Konstantin.

[Jadid (Google Cloud Platform Support)]

Hello,

As this is a feature that would be helpful for many users, would you please create a feature request so we can get an implementation of this feature from the engineering team as soon as possible?

[Paddy Alton]

Thank you, I have now done that here.