Google’s efforts to reduce bias and promote fairness have led to changes in Google Translate.
Google Translate learns from hundreds of millions of already-translated examples from the web, which meant that gender biases such as skewing masculine for words like ‘doctor’ were inadvertently replicated.
From now on Google Translate will provide feminine and masculine translations for some gender-neutral words.
For the moment the feature is available when translating English into French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish and when translating Turkish into English.
Sources: Endgadget; Google.