I recently discovered you could use Google Sheets to translate language using the formula =GoogleTranslate(text, source_language, target_language). It’s a cool trick that i just had to try out. And obviously the language of choice was Swahili. I tried to see if they still mess up the genders like they used to do a while back. They haven’t changed.

I created a list of short gendered sentences in English on the first column. Then I used the second column to translate the first column to Swahili. Then the third column to translate the second column back to English.

Swahili is not very gendered. ” She went to school” and “He went to school” both translate to “Alienda shule” in Swahili. So I was curious if Google Translate still upholds, the typical gender stereotypes. To spice things up, I even used the non stereotypical pronouns in the first column.

Here are the results.

It leans towards gendered stereotypes most of the time, if you ask me but I could me wrong. What do you think? Here’s a link to the Sheet. You can add something on the first column and it will be translated to Swahili and back.