Hyderabad: Human Rights activists from Telangana vented out their ire at Google for translating the word “Dalit Vyakti” in Hindi to “underdog” and alternatively to a “depressed person”.
A screengrab of Google translation showing Dalit Vyakti as underdog.
Translations into different Indian languages by machines sounds easier than it is, especially when it is not just about replacing a corresponding word from one language to another. Underdog means “a competitor thought to have little chance of winning a fight or contest”. But the Google translation thinks it means a person from the Dalit caste. Various permutations and combinations of the word yielded the same result.
Previously, the word “underdog” when translated into Hindi gave Dalit Vyakti, which was soon changed by Google and started showing up as the same word as “underdog” in Hindi. Reacting to these translations, a few Dalit rights activists launched a social media campaign asking Google to correct it. Activists pointed out that machines throwing up such results was “concerning”. Human Rights activist Karthik Navayan Battul said, “Branding individuals of some communities as incapable and losers is ridiculous and atrocious. I don’t understand language experts who are feeding Google, but they seem to have racist ideas. Most of the new generation have access to internet and completely rely on the internet. This information is being fed into Google, which is being fed to the younger generation and is very problematic.”
He said that Google needed to do a thorough audit of the social implications of these translations. In 2016, it was translating underdog to Dalit directly. Then after complaints, it intervened manually to not have any Hindi equivalent for underdog. Companies use the Neural Machine Translation to make sense of words in the local context and their dynamics with other words.
Mr Balaji Vishwanathan of Mitra Robots said, “The issue is that Google uses automated methods where the algorithms run through existing text in multiple languages, looking for matching phrases. If a lot of documents used Dalit in the context of underdogs or depressed people, the translation would show that. Google does do a manual cleanup on such controversial translations. This particular case just slipped through the cracks.”
