While the themes addressed in the work (which Apple has announced here ) do, to some extent, engage with current debates over definitions of gender, it focuses on a much older problem: the fact that 84 of the world’s 229 known languages use a sex-based gender system .
Red dots indicate languages that use a sex-based gender system. Source: https://wals.info/feature/31A#map
Surprisingly, the English language falls into the gender-based category , because it assigns either masculine or feminine singular pronouns.
In contrast, all Romance languages (including more than half a billion Spanish speakers) – and many other popular languages, such as Russian – require gender agreement in ways that force translation systems to address sex assignment in language.
The new article illustrates this by looking at all the possible Spanish translations of the sentence The secretary was angry with the boss. :
Source: Unite.AI
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