DoNotHaveAClue @donothaveaclue - Tumblr Blog

"Guy" and "man" have different connotations with adjectival nouns. Like "tree guy" = arborist but "tree man" = he lives in a tree, or maybe he is a tree.

thedupshadove

"I know a guy" = "I have a useful contact."

"I know a man" = "I am about to tell you a story."

caroldanversenthusiast

*Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis play girlfriends in a Christmas movie*

Me: Wow this is so cute and amazing, COULD IT GET ANY BETTER??

*Aubrey Plaza enters the screen as a single, lesbian doctor who wears really nice suits*

Me: IT GOT BETTER.

inactive-sry

butchfagminotaur

gays be like

theprideful-deactivated20251201

what people think lesbians do in the locker room:

what they actually do:

biseckuals

learninglinguist

Link to the original tweet

damnprecious

I got tagged in this post so I’m just gonna go off, I guess.

These tweets are from 2017. Now in 2020, I went to test out how google translate would translate similar sentences in Finnish, as Finnish also only has a gender neutral “hän” for he/she. Here’s what I got for results:

Both feminine and masculine translation options. Even for firefighter, which still directly translates as “fireman”. Similarly, I got both masculine and feminine results when I searched for a sentence in Turkish to English, but as I don’t know Turkish I didn’t try more than once as I cannot tell how correct it is otherwise. According to my quick googling, this feature was added in late 2018.

More interestingly, when I translated from Finnish to French, I was no longer offered two options as translations. Google translate also offered a general info page on this phenomenon, explaining how the software offers both masculine and feminine translations for some gender neutral words and sentences in some languages, and that more are in development, which is what I’m assuming is why the search between Finnish and French only supplied one version at this time. It takes time to work through all possible language pairs.

If I translated several sentences in one go it lost the second translation like so:

This type of a translation is more complex for a machine translating software to understand as there is much more info to translate than a single, simple sentence. The actual translation would also become more difficult to use if all the senteces were offered twice as masculine and feminine as the text would become repetitive and more difficult to read. Translations made by humans also don’t offer all possible gender options but rely on the larger context on what translation solutions are made. In these simple out-of-context sentences the machine picks the option that is statistically the most common. The machine would likely use wrong pronouns even in cases where there is enough context for a human translator to figure out the gendered pronouns as translation software at this time is far from perfect.

Softwares have limitations, far beyond simply gendered vs non-gendered pronouns because all languages have complex features that don’t have a perfect match in the target language.

Could google translate be coded to offer consistently only masculine or only feminine translation options? Possibly. That would not be ideal either. Could it be coded to only use gender neutral pronouns for languages where gendered pronouns are used? Who knows. It definitely would not reflect how the language is actually used. Some languages simply use gendered language, and the software functions in that context and with that corpus material. Would that change in the future if the language in question moves towarda gender neutral pronouns? Definitely. Because statistics.

A human translator would have the same issue of not knowing which gendered pronoun to use in a translation if there is no context and the source language is gender neutral. However a human translator is much more free to choose a gender neutral singular they or include a he/she (in the case of English) or consistently use one gendered pronoun for a translation, although the commussioner may affect this. A software that relies on corpus matches and statistics can’t make a conscious choice.

These matches based on statistics don’t simply come down to tech industry being predominantly male. The people who code the software do not write the texts of the corpus. The corpus is collected from existing texts. Google translate uses a corpus that consists of millions of documents, which include documents from the United Nations and the European Parliament. Google translate is currently based on a neural machine translation principle, which means it translates by predicting the most likely sequence of words based on the massive corpus.

English has gendered pronouns. There are fields where majority of work force is male or female, which is more likely to show in the texts the software uses. It makes a guess on what pronouns to use based on that context. The software itself isn’t inherently sexist in this case. It just works with the existing material.

Quite frankly I’m amazed that google translate even offers the simple sentences with both masculine and feminine translations. I’m not surprised it offers only one option if more things are translated at once. Google translate is an useful tool if you need a quick translation that doesn’t have to be that good. It shouldn’t be relied on as anything more than that, especially in languages that have less material it can use as a corpus.

Most importantly, we need human translators, the machine translators cannot do what human translators can.

Source: a human translator.

Tl;dr - google translate has been improved, it offers both masculine and feminine options for simple translations, and relies on a massive corpus that’s collected from existing sources that are not written by the people who create the software.

learninglinguist

Since I’m newly Back On Tumblr, I’ll once again reblog this post that has haunted me for three years. I really love this addition because it distinguishes between unintentional biases that come from the people who create the technology vs. the huge collection of information that teaches the tech. Thanks for breaking down the logistics of Google Translate’s abilities!!

gemma-nye

*hurriedly scribbling notes*

take-my-worf-please-deactivated

finally, a logical explanation for why fuckbucket is such a good word.

bulletproofandboundforglory

fucktrumpet and shitbiscuit finally make sense now

ashby-santoso

No wonder piss wizard is so effective

marthajefferson

the origin of the letter 🇦

(from the documentary The Secret History of Writing, 2020)

geminiwave

Worldbuilders naming towns: I named this town Elygwe’meth which means “Where the Dearly Beloved King died next to his Lover” in the language I invented and also a combination of the Old English word for diamonds and the Maori word for apples since that’s their main exports

People in real life naming towns: I named this town Big Falls cause big fall there

bumblebeebats

me poring over a fantasy map: Shit I already used that name for a town, I can’t use it again, that’s such sloppy worldbuilding

real life maps: There are six rivers in Britain called the River Avon, which means River River, because when the Romans asked the Celts “what is that?” they replied “a river?” and the Romans nodded and jotted it down

shinyhappygoth

Terry Pratchett:

The forest of Skund was indeed enchanted, which was nothing unusual on the Disc, and was also the only forest in the whole universe to be called – in the local language – Your Finger You Fool, which was the literal meaning of the word Skund. The reason for this is regrettably all too common. When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don’t Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool. Rainclouds clustered around the bald heights of Mt. Oolskunrahod (‘Who is this Fool who does Not Know what a Mountain is’)…

blessyouhawkeye

thebaconsandwichofregret

Weak ass NuWho bitches in the comments being all "wah wah the last season was disappointing! It's going the same way!"

Come on people! Do you have any idea of the absolute bullshit the show put out in the 70s and 80s?

Doctor Who is the longest running science fiction television series OF ALL TIME! It doesn't have a weak episode or a weak season, it has weak DECADES. So sit your asses down, put up, and power through until a regime change brings some creative ideas that are more in tune with your personal tastes like the rest of us do.

Honestly! Fucking amateurs!

vampireapologist-archive-deacti

“Tomorrow I Am Buying A Leather-Bound Book,” or Some lazy poetry saved in my iPhone notes sometime last week 🌿

zevveli

I still think that my favorite urban legend/folklore fact is that there are certain areas in New Orleans where you cannot get a taxi late at night not because it isn’t safe, but because taxi companies have had recurring problems of picking up ghosts in those areas who are not aware that they are dead and disappearing from the cab before reaching the destination and therefore stiffing the driver on the fare causing a loss for the company.

elsajeni

An occupational hazard of cab driving I had not previously considered

princessnijireiki

I love that the nola problem here is not “ghosts in my taxi cab,” but “ghosts are FUCKING BROKE DEAD BASTARDS & I GOT BILLS”

siderealsandman

Horror is when ghosts get into cabs and scare drivers Magical realism is when cab companies have to develop policies to prevent ghastly fare-theft

kc749

In a book about the tsunami in Japan in 2011, the writer talked about how there was a huge increase in reports of ghostly activity. Apparently in Japan treating ghosts rudely is basically considered the stupidest thing you could possibly do. For months after the tsunami, taxi drivers would pick up a passenger only to have them give an address in one of the devastated areas. The cab driver often looked up halfway to the destination to find their fare had disappeared. Not wanting to be impolite to the person (even if they were dead) they’d drive to the address, open the door to let them out, then drive away.