by ChatGPT was introduced by OpenAI in November 2022 and has since gone viral. Moreover, it is obvious that the technology will remain, given the recent launches of premium versions of the original program.
Today we will test whether ChatGPT can translate content and evaluate how well it can translate.
To begin with, we asked ChatGPT if it could even translate content.
While he acknowledged that his translation capabilities are still limited, he confirmed that he can translate content. However, it’s best to double-check with a translator or native speaker, as there may be subtleties or other peculiarities in the source language.
However, since it is a fairly new technology, ChatGPT has yet to be properly evaluated.
Try different language pairs
To this end, we have decided to translate the press release of the French Senate into English.
We noticed that the translated text is consistent and quite succinctly reflects the original message. However, we noticed that it did not preserve the French abbreviations of various institutions and phrases when translating the text into English.
Next, we tried to translate a fragment of a book by one of the most popular English novelists, Agatha Christie.
It managed to translate the essence of the emotions conveyed and proved to be better than Google’s translation tool at finding more appropriate and precise words. However, we must understand that a professional literary translator would not be happy with such a literal translation.
Then we decided to try a different language combination, Spanish-English. We asked ChatGPT to translate the press release section of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation, a department of the Spanish government.
We compared the translation with the Google-powered English translation on the official website and came to the conclusion that it is almost the same in terms of both words and syntax.
As far as we can observe, ChatGPT can conveniently translate simple, direct messages from one language to another.
One word in Spanish immediately brings to mind the great 16th century writer Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Cervantes continues to be one of the most translated authors, and we decided to compare ChatGPT’s translation of his text with a previously published translation by professional literary translator John Ormsby.
Now let’s look at Ormby’s translation of the same sentence.
“In the village of La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to mention, there lived recently one of those gentlemen who keeps a lance in a spear-stand, an old buckler, a skinny axe, and a coursing greyhound.”
We found Ormby’s translation to be more “literary” and “novel-like”, while ChatGPT’s translation is a bit more direct. However, it does not disappoint in that it retains the syntax of the original sentence and does not try to simplify it too much, thus preserving the flavor of the text.
So far we have dealt only with Romance languages. We decided to ask ChatGPT about his knowledge of non-Romance languages.
The tool admitted that even when trained in both Romance and non-Romance languages, there are challenges with the latter set of languages, such as complex grammar and non-Latin script.
Nevertheless, we went ahead and decided to try Mandarin Chinese. According to Ethnologue, it is now the most spoken language if we look at the number of native speakers. According to Ethnologue 2022 data, it is the native language of 920 million people.
We also asked ChatGPT to translate a popular Chinese idiom we often come across when watching TV series.
We referred to a popular Mandarin learning resource and concluded that while ChatGPT successfully translated the meaning of the idiom, its literal translation was different from that offered by the online resource.
And yet, compared to the Google tool, ChatGPT is much better.
Is ChatGPT a good translator?
A list of scientists from Chinese tech giant Tencent AI recently published a preliminary study asking whether ChatGPT is a good translator. Wenxiang Jiao, Wenxuan Wang, Jen-tse Huang, Xing Wang and Zhaopeng Tu are the authors of this study.
The group decided to try an English-Chinese pair on the tool.
The main purpose of this study is to evaluate ChatGPT for English text translation as most of the training data is in English.
ChatGPT does not need to know the language of the content to be translated. But the researchers also concluded that once the source language was told, its translation turned out to be inferior. It seemed contradictory.
We realize that ChatGPT has been trained primarily on English data, but it seems to be able to accurately capture the meaning of Chinese utterances sufficiently to generate English translations.
The authors admit in their research that more experiments with more language pairs are needed to better assess the quality of ChatGPT translation.
How does ChatGPT affect the future of the translation industry?
The main advantage of this translation technology is its speed. A human translation can take hours or days to complete, depending on the complexity and length of the project. ChatGPT, on the other hand, generates the translation in seconds or milliseconds.
Another benefit is that translations will become more accessible with the increased availability of online language tools such as ChatGPT. Because ChatGPT speeds up the translation process significantly, translators spend less time on each job, resulting in lower costs.
However, it should be noted that highly regulated fields such as medicine and law use sophisticated terminology. The criteria for publishing its content vary widely around the world. As a result, content often requires significant revision to make it suitable for foreign regulators and audiences.
In addition, using ChatGPT for translation may expose your data to a breach of privacy.
We concluded that ChatGPT still has a long way to go before it can create real human translations. However, availability and affordability may increase in the near future.
