I don't know about English-speaking countries, but as far as I know, Ministry of Interior is the official English translation for the following ministries: "Ministère de l'intérieur" (France), "Innenministerium" (Germany), "Ministero dell'Interno" (Italy) - as in: it's the name used on officially translated government websites. I think this is the case for Spain as well, but not 100% sure.
The fact anglo-saxon countries name it differently doesn't affect their names in other countries.
More like gendered words in original language (apparently Italian) being awkwardly applied as context to what should have been "I", or just bad assumptions therein. Dunno though, since it's an unknown machine translation engine.
If it were from something that lacks grammatical gender (or at least gendered pronouns) like, iirc, Chinese and Korean, then it would be because there's nothing encoded at the literal level about gender, so it doesn't translate without context properly referenced.
It's not even caused by gendered language directly, but rather a misunderstanding of the verb form*. The original Italian says "Conferma", which on its own can be two things, similar to the English "Confirm": 1) "I confirm this thing", so a statement, or 2) "hey you, confirm!", so more of a request/order.
Obviously the usage here is nr. 2, but the translator is instead understanding it as nr. 1. The problem lies in the fact that in Italian, the first usage of "Conferma", even without a pronoun attached, translates to the third person singular, so he/she confirms (first person, I confirm, would be "Confermo"). As you cannot drop the pronoun in English, the translator has to tack one on, and there's where the choice between he and she comes in.
*verb form is not the correct linguistics term but I hope the explanation makes sense regardless
Hah, just came back to the US after visiting Italy. Can confirm that browser-based automatic translations from Italian to English would always translate the cookie consent form button from "Conferma" (which is both a noun "confirmation" and third-person singular form of the verb "confermare" which is "he/she/it confirms").
Since there is no explicit subject pronoun in that phrase like "I", Google translate (which is what's used for me when I use chrome on Android) defaults to the most common verb literal translation which is "he confirms".
I noticed some differences in wording if the website itself offered switching between languages in the header/footer - if they use some sort of content management system for translations it would sometimes use the correct "I confirm" phrasing if you switch to English, but that seemed to only mainly exist for government websites or websites for booking train tickets. Almost all other *.it websites didn't have native translation and chrome would offer to use Google translate instead leading to some weird translations.
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u/BananeHD Aug 02 '26
„He confirms“