Is “Google Translate” Homophobic?
By: Brian Fehler
Tags: Technology, Travel, Google, LGBTQ, Language

How Google and Twitter Erased My Boyfriend

Isla Mujeres, off the coast of Cancún. Author photo.

A couple of months ago, on a vacation in Mexico, I met the man of my dreams. I’ll call him Diego. We bonded instantly, laughed often, enjoyed each other’s company, and pledged to each other our eternal love.

Picture it: there we were, dancing the first of our forever dances, “ ‘neath that tropic, kaleidoscopical sky,” as Ira Gershwin wrote, about a similar beach.

But, um, okay, maybe it wasn’t quite that romantic.

It was only a two-week resort romance, after all. Well, not even that: more like a resort flirtation.

So, calm down, mom; don’t send the wedding invitations just yet.

If Diego and I didn’t actually pledge our eternal love that week, we did promise to keep in touch. So began our WhatsApp and Twitter odyssey.

Our private Twitter accounts allowed us to send self-consciously silly, cute messages to one another.

Messages like:

Me, to him: My friend said I wouldn’t meet anybody in Cancún. I told her Mex-I-Can!

Him, to me: You have a friend in me. You ARE a friend in me.

Usually, Diego sent his texts and tweets to me in English, since his English is much better than my Spanish. But sometimes we changed things up: I’d tweet him in Spanish, hoping I got all the words right, without sounding too formal.

Even in Mexico, we’d tried, often humorously, to flirt in the other’s native language.

I began calling him Day, exaggeratedly drawing out the first letter of his name, D, as it’s pronounced in Spanish.

He began calling me Bee, the English pronunciation of the first letter of my name, Brian.

In texts and tweets, we were D and B.

I started encouraging D to send me his texts and tweets in Spanish, so he did, sometimes.

As in the tweet which read:

Espero que B esté pasando una buena noche y extrañe a su novio

Confession: when D sent me a WhatsApp message in Spanish, I sometimes had to use one of two underutilized tools — my brain or my old college English-Spanish dictionary — to figure out what he was saying.

Twitter, though, at least the iPhone Twitter app I use, has a handy little translate button right there below any tweet that might need translating. (My Facebook app has this, too, and often automatically translates my last name — Fehler — to its German meaning: mistake. So much for keeping that secret.)

When I received D’s Esperos text, late at night, I clicked Translate this Tweet, and peered at the bright screen in my dark room. This is the translation Twitter gave me:

I hope that B is having a good night and missing her boyfriend

Her boyfriend.

I didn’t think too much about it then. I was sleepy and ready for bed, so I just sent a reply in the form of a string of heart-eye emojis.

I seriously send an excessive amount of heart-eye emojis for a man of my age.

The next day, I looked back at the tweet’s translation. It started to bother me.

I messaged D about the translation. He gave me a little good-natured, much deserved, crap for using the translate button at all.

But he sent other messages of a similar grammatical construction, just as a test.

He tried this:

Brian está esperando a su novio

Twitter — powered by Google Translate — rendered it this way, in English:

Brian is waiting for her boyfriend.

Again, her boyfriend.

D tweeted another test, the same sentence, this time changing Brian to a more common name in Spanish, Mateo.

Mateo está esperando a su novio

Twitter/Google Translate recognized the usually-male name of Mateo, translated it to Matthew, but still, it came out this way:

Matthew is waiting for her boyfriend.

Her boyfriend.

There’s reason, to be sure, for confusion. The pronoun su in Spanish can be either her or his in English.

But still: Twitter/Google Translate, even with all the various usually-male names we tried (Pedro, Roberto, Miguel) assumed the correct English pronoun for su was her.

Because, according to Google Translate, since novio is boyfriend, the su in question must be her.

Not his.

Because, again according to Google Translate, a boy would not have a boyfriend. Any su that does have a boyfriend must be a she.

Over coffee, I told one of my best friends about the problem.

How did she reply? “But Diego isn’t even your boyfriend, Brian.”

“That’s not the point!” I said, too loud in the quiet café.

She shook her head, facing her own phone, tapping her own Twitter, not too concerned about mine. “Nobody’s your boyfriend, if we’re being honest.”

I mean: harsh.

I mean, also: true.

“But that’s seriously not the point!” None of my friends or not-boyfriends have ever met a point they couldn’t just completely dull by indifference or irony.

So I drew her attention from her own Twitter to my private one (which, yes, she ridiculed me for having). Faced with the evidence, she came around to my side.

“You should write to Google,” she said. At last.

I hadn’t thought of that. I will. (And I’ll post any updates here, as they come.)

I’ll write to Google because words matter. Language choices matter. Translations matter. Translations are not mechanical; they represent values, ideologies, politics.

Examples abound. From Emily Wilson’s recent (2018) translation of the Odyssey, which does not shy away, as earlier English translations had done, from making readers feel uncomfortable about the existence of slavery in ancient Greece, to Gloria’s Anzaldúa’s important words, in her classic Borderlands/La Frontera (1987; several ensuing editions): “So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language.”

Translations, as Wilson shows, as Anzaldúa shows, can reveal, or obscure, the complexities of slavery in ancient Greece, can reveal, or obscure, the Chicans experience in the US.

Translations can be, as Anzaldúa has it, a light, luz en lo oscuro.

Or translations can erase.

Translations can erase Brian’s boyfriend, Mateo’s boyfriend, by assuming that no Brian or Mateo would have a boyfriend in the first place. Google Translate tells us Brian or Mateo must have a novia, not a novio, a girlfriend, not a boyfriend. Brian’s su would be a woman, surely, not a man.

True, as my friend pointed out, this particular Brian doesn’t have a boyfriend. According to Google Translate, no Brian, anywhere, ever would.