Very weird reporting, if you can even call it that. The extrapolation of the car being stopped by police linked with the tracking device is, by definition, speculation. There is no information on who the "activist" is, etc. A bit more colour on who is being tracked would provide more legitimacy to the post. It seems there is an agenda somewhere here.
Do so many languages really not use gendered pronouns? Seems I'm seeing this happen all the time. Doesn't it cause extra confusion in the native languages?
I can't speak for Spanish, but in at least in Finnish there wont be confusion, because pronouns are used to refer to the previously named/described person:
"A man went missing last night. He was wearing a red shirt."
"Mary had a vacation last month. She travelled to Spain."
Of course there could be situations where the description doesn't tell you the persons gender, but those are rare and the gender likely didn't matter anyway (as otherwise it would have been stated). Plus since you don't need to use gendered words, no one will know even if you mistake a woman for a man or vice versa.
I guess there may be some other cases that I can't think of, but the point remains the same; using the same pronoun for "he" and "she" (and "it" in spoken language) doesn't really cause confusion, because that's how the language works. People have been speaking it without having separate pronouns for a long time, and the language has evolved accordingly.
I took a look at a few of the top articles on Helsinki times right now (yes, those don't represent the spoken language very well, but I doubt it matters for this purpose) and some of their top comments. In the articles themselves almost every instance of "hän" (=he/she) referred to someone who had been described or named in the previous sentence. Only in one occasion the person was named in the previous paragraph (there were no other people named in between). In the comments there were some cases with no name/description, but they were commenting on a story about a person (unabomber in this case), so there was no ambiguity there.
Its not that seldom that subject or object of the sentence are gendered, but the pronouns are gender-neutral. As the english translation of "activist" is gender-neutral you would need quite sophisticated software to not lose that information in the translation process.
Additionally, in French, possessive pronouns agree with the nouns they modify, so the word for "car" would receive a feminine pronoun. A quick search leads me to believe that Spanish is the same.
Perhaps Google Translate is taught to over-correct by user modifications and substitutes the male possessive pronoun in its place.
