Over the course of this year, there’s been an effort across Google to promote fairness and reduce bias in machine learning. Our latest development in this effort addresses gender bias by providing feminine and masculine translations for some gender-neutral words on the Google Translate website.

Google Translate learns from hundreds of millions of already-translated examples from the web. Historically, it has provided only one translation for a query, even if the translation could have either a feminine or masculine form. So when the model produced one translation, it inadvertently replicated gender biases that already existed. For example: it would skew masculine for words like “strong” or “doctor,” and feminine for other words, like “nurse” or “beautiful.”

Now you’ll get both a feminine and masculine translation for a single word—like “surgeon”—when translating from English into French, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish. You’ll also get both translations when translating phrases and sentences from Turkish to English. For example, if you type “o bir doktor” in Turkish, you’ll now get “she is a doctor” and “he is a doctor” as the gender-specific translations.

In the future, we plan to extend gender-specific translations to more languages, launch on other Translate surfaces like our iOS and Android apps, and address gender bias in features like query auto-complete. And we're already thinking about how to address non-binary gender in translations, though it’s not part of this initial launch.

It’s been twelve years since the launch of Google Translate, and since then Translate has evolved to keep up with the ways people use it. Initially translating between English and Arabic only, we now translate 30 trillion sentences per year across 103 languages.

Google Translate has become an essential tool for communicating across languages, and we recently redesigned the Translate website to make it easier to use. Here’s what you need to know:

• The site’s new look is now consistent with other Google products, and updated labeling and typography make it easier to navigate. For instance, you’ve always been able to upload documents for translation, but now that feature is easier to find. 
• Now it’s even more convenient to save and organize important translations you regularly utilize or search for. We’ve added labels to each saved translation, so if you speak multiple languages, you can sort and group your translations with a single click.
• We've made the website responsive so it can adjust dynamically for your screen size. So when we launch new features, you get a great web experience across all your devices: mobile, tablet, or desktop. 
  

To check out the new site, visit translate.google.com.