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> Yes, and allowing people to speak introduces this exact same issue... It's not the purpose of a translation service - to let people customize the translation

> Yes, and allowing people to speak introduces this exact same issue... It's not the purpose of a translation service - to let people customize the translation such that it fits their own personal biases and sits more comfortably with their world views.

slibhb 6y ago
> It's not the purpose of a translation service - to let people customize the translation such that it fits their own personal biases and sits more comfortably with their world views. A translation service requires user input, spoken or written, which is necessarily biased based on how the user speaks/writes/thinks. The service is also biased based on the data and methods that are used to engineer it. In my opinion, it is perfectly fine for people to be biased. Whenever I choose to write, I am expressing my personal (biased) view. But when it comes to machine translation, I think it's reasonable to object to bias and so, for contentious issues like personal pronouns, I think it makes sense to allow people to choose. In other words: there is simply no right way to decide between defaulting to "he", "she", or "they" for third person gender neutral. I use "he" (it's how I was taught and it sounds better to me). Some people would accuse me of phallocentrism or linguistic conservatism, but fine. In modern philosophy, "she" is used. In some circles, "they" is used. I see no issue allowing the user to specify their preferred rule, though it might be technically challenging (I have no idea).
BoiledCabbage 6y ago
> It's not the purpose of a translation service And I can guarantee you've never used this line of reasoning against translation services performing spelling or grammar checking. Yet those are also "not the purpose of a translation service". It's always interesting to see the twists people will go to try to use post-hoc justify an opinion.

slibhb 6y ago

> It's not the purpose of a translation service - to let people customize the translation such that it fits their own personal biases and sits more comfortably with their world views. A translation service requires user input, spoken or written, which is necessarily biased based on how the user speaks/writes/thinks. The service is also biased based on the data and methods that are used to engineer it. In my opinion, it is perfectly fine for people to be biased. Whenever I choose to write, I am expressing my personal (biased) view. But when it comes to machine translation, I think it's reasonable to object to bias and so, for contentious issues like personal pronouns, I think it makes sense to allow people to choose. In other words: there is simply no right way to decide between defaulting to "he", "she", or "they" for third person gender neutral. I use "he" (it's how I was taught and it sounds better to me). Some people would accuse me of phallocentrism or linguistic conservatism, but fine. In modern philosophy, "she" is used. In some circles, "they" is used. I see no issue allowing the user to specify their preferred rule, though it might be technically challenging (I have no idea).

BoiledCabbage 6y ago

> It's not the purpose of a translation service And I can guarantee you've never used this line of reasoning against translation services performing spelling or grammar checking. Yet those are also "not the purpose of a translation service". It's always interesting to see the twists people will go to try to use post-hoc justify an opinion.