Google is in trouble with the gays again. This time for offering offensive suggestions for the word “gay” on its translation tool.
Google Translate works sort of like a thesaurus. A person types in a word and the software pulls up suggested translations for that word. It’s a handy little tool, especially for high school students struggling with their French homework.
However, a number users have noticed that the software gives a number of offensive homophobic terms when trying to translate the word “gay.” Some of the terms include poof, queen, faggot, and fag, as well as fairy, queen, sodomite, pansy boy, and homosexualist. (We couldn’t help but chuckle at that last one.)
Naturally, an online petition was created demanding Google remove all antigay words from its Google Translate software. So far, the petition has garnered more than 50,000 signatures from homosexualists and their allies.
How about we take this to the next level?
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Of course, this isn’t the first time Google has been in hot water with homosexualists. Last November, a lesbian couple was shocked to learn Google Maps listed the name of their street as “faggots live here.” A week after that, a game that encouraged users to violently murder homosexualist men was briefly uploaded to the Google Play app store.
A spokesperson for the tech giant apologized for the most recent mishap, saying: “As soon as we were informed that some of our translations for certain terms were serving inappropriate results, we immediately began working to fix the issue.”
“Our systems produce translations automatically based on existing translations on the web, so we appreciate when users point out issues such as this,” the spokesperson continues. “We apologize for any offense this has caused people.”
h/t: PinkNews
Related stories:
“Shoot The Gays” Game App Pulled By Google After Public Outcry
Lesbian Couple Shocked To Discover Their Address Changed To “Faggots Live Here” On Google Maps
Pakistan May Hate Gay Men But It Leads The World In Google Searches For Gay Porn
onthemark
For what it’s worth, Gore Vidal liked “homosexualist” and used it all the time.
jwtraveler
@onthemark: I like the sound of that too although I’m not sure in what context I would use it. Perhaps for HRC types who view the world entirely through how everything affects gay people. All of the other words could be appropriate in particular situations, but I don’t think I’d want the average high school student using them as synonyms for “gay”.
Cam
Homosexualist? LOL
Maude
A hetrosexualist goes into a homosexualist bar and the bisexualist says: “I’ll have one of each, and a lesbosexualist to go…unless, like all good sexualists, you allow sexualism in the back room.
Charli Girl
@jwtraveler : I’m one of ” those types”, but to my defense, I got to the point where everything was built on and around hetero ” lifestyle”, and I grew tired of there not being a lane for us tax payers also!! JS
inkpeninmd
Really? All the cr*p we have to put up with and this is what we choose to be upset about?
PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS
@Maude:
I heard about that incident, but you forgot to mention there was a sodomeysexualist invited to join also……………………….. :p
grero
@onthemark: That was exactly my first thought. From his book Sexually Speaking:
“Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. These sexual acts are entirely natural; if they were not, no one would perform them… I have often thought that reason no one has yet been able to come up with a good word to describe the homosexualist (sometimes known as gay, fag, queer, etc.) is because he does not exist… [Gay is] just a bad word. You see, I don’t think you need a word for it. This is what you have to evolve. These words have go to wither away in a true Hegelian cycle.” – via http://grero.com/#_ftnref258
It’s ridiculous that people want to censor “negative” words. It’s part of the language. You could put “Extremely Disparaging and Offensive” as a tag that some dictionaries use anyways, but firing them down the memory hole? That’s so faggy.
Cam
@inkpeninmd: You act as if sending a 10 second e-mail to Google is taking time away from any of that other stuff.
DuMaurier
@grero: Well, everybody got here before me re: the late Mr. Vidal. His reduction of sexuality to “acts” was on the one hand a statement for openness and freedom, but on the other, troubling to many because it goes against the idea of “discrete” or “suspect” classifications, which is the premise of anti-discrimination law in the U.S. You didn’t have to agree with him on everything to find him endlessly interesting.
ethan_hines
Well they are still calling us pedophiles…..translation of fag to french=pédé and we all know what that is short for.
Captain Obvious
I’m more concerned with Google selling our search history and account information to the government for use against us than I am with offensive suggestions that I can easily ignore.
jwtraveler
@Charli Girl: Well, most things are built around “white” and “male” too, but you probably don’t object to that.
Faggot
homosexualist
(rare, old-fashioned, often pejorative) Alternative form of homosexual
1949, George Kingsley Zipf, Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort:
[…] roughly speaking, a homosexualist is born and not made.
1983, Michael Denneny, Charles Ortleb, Thomas Steele, The Christopher Street reader (page 297)
They have got fairly liberal laws on victimless crimes, but the Los Angeles police are still busy entrapping homosexualists because the police chief in Los Angeles is very antifag.
2002, F. Earle Fox and David W. Virtue, Homosexuality: Good and Right in the Eyes of God?:
[…] and how the homosexualist cause is rooted squarely in the secular/pagan view of the cosmos.
2003, Linda Alcoff, Linda Martín Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta, Identities: Race, Class, Gender, and Nationality:
Fundamentally, unconsciously, I believe he’s a homosexualist.
Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, 1989
tricky ricky
i rather like homosexualist.
vive
@ethan_hines, I believe that’s short for pederast, not pedophile.
ethan_hines
@vive: Which wikipedia defines as:The commonly accepted reference definitions of pederasty refer to a sexual relationship, or to copulation, between older and younger males. The OED offers: “Homosexual relations between a man and a boy; homosexual anal intercourse, usually with a boy or younger man as the passive partner.”
Pederasty . Sorry not the same and never was the same as Homosexuality.
J.T.
As soon as I read the term “homosexualist” I was reminded that this coinage was created by the self-loathing elitist Gore Vidal. A homosexualist for the ages was he!
Queer4Life
$#!t like this really urks my chain. Idiots who get mad about stuff like this make it really difficult for the rest of us who just want to translate something. Anyone who knows anything about language and translation knows what a little bitch it can be to take something from one language and put it into another. This is especially true when your dealing with colloquial terms.
Stop being a pain in my @$$ and let me just translate.
onthemark
testing
testing
ethan_hines
@onthemark: Success!