
Apart from writing code or explaining concepts, ChatGPT can also be a useful tool for translating text. But how does it compare to sophisticated machine translation providers that do the same thing?
And especially those that can do so for free, such as Google Translate?
That’s what we’ll cover in this ChatGPT translation guide, as we explore:
We’ll also shed light on ways of improving ChatGPT’s translations and assessing their quality. Last but not least, we’ll advise on when using other translation tools may be more appropriate in certain situations.
With ChatGPT being a form of machine translation, it’s worthwhile looking into the origins of this technology.
Also known as AI translation, machine translation is a subfield of computational linguistics that uses software to translate text, or speech, into different languages. It enables a computer to produce translations without human intervention, and quicker than humans can too.
The very first form of machine translation was developed in the 1970s. It was referred to as rule-based machine translation (RBMT) and used sets of grammatical rules to generate word-for-word text translations. RBMT was a rigid translation method that tended to produce poor-quality translations.
Subsequently came statistical machine translation (SMT). This technology analyzed human-provided translations, then used prediction algorithms to determine the best way of translating a source text. Such translations were more accurate than those produced by RBMT by leaps and bounds, but advancements in machine translation technology didn’t stop there!
The most sophisticated machine translation technology in the translation industry’s arsenal is currently neural machine translation (NMT).
NMT uses deep neural networks to analyze and identify patterns in the source text before producing an appropriate translation. The deep neural networks in NMT systems can have different structures, or “architecture,” which affect the nature of their output.
NMT is also what powers ChatGPT’s translation capabilities. ChatGPT is based on the transformer architecture – the Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) architecture, to be precise. GPT has been trained on large datasets and can generate human-like responses when provided with inputs.
The makers of ChatGPT, OpenAI, then packaged its GPT language model into a chat interface, allowing ChatGPT to hold entire conversations with humans with ease.
There are reasons why humans have been steadily working on improving machine translation technology since the 1970s. Machine translation offers superior benefits in terms of:
That said, conventional machine translation technology still has room for improvement. For example, the technology may face difficulty in accurately translating idiomatic language and accounting for context, compared to if a professional – and human – translator were to do the same job.
But ChatGPT isn’t your typical machine translation tool. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t even intentionally built for translation purposes! And such unorthodoxy is where it may have an edge in producing translations.
The nature of ChatGPT makes it a useful language translation tool in areas such as:
Despite the translation prowess that ChatGPT brings to the table, there are situations where you may want to look for alternative translation solutions.
If you’re translating legal documents for high-stakes international business deals, for example, it may be prudent to delegate the work to human experts skilled in translating technical legal jargon.
Also, while ChatGPT can translate a couple of paragraphs just fine, the AI tool has a rough limit of 3,000 words per request. As a result, it isn’t an ideal tool for translating substantial amounts of text (say 10,000 words or even more). However, this may be the scale of the endeavor for efforts such as website translation.
Given ChatGPT’s present limitations, website translation solutions like Weglot currently use machine translation software, such as Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, and DeepL, to translate website content at scale instead.
Here’s how the translation capabilities of these machine translation providers compare against those of ChatGPT:
Machine translation software can be used to translate website content, multilingual blog content, support documentation, user-generated content on social media, and customer testimonials. Machine translation providers in certain industries may also tailor their software to meet their customers’ specific needs.
Just take website localization, for example. Localizing a website generally involves first localizing its content, then publishing the localized output. If you’re using a non-specialized machine translation provider to translate and localize your website, you may need to work with your development team to implement your localized content.
However, we’ve developed our Weglot website translation solution to not only translate your website content, but also conveniently display the finalized translations on your website for you. You won’t have to delve into your website’s technical backend to get these up.
Weglot also provides other helpful features for helping your multilingual website rank well in online searches. These include automatic hreflang tag implementation, and the organizing of your translated content into dedicated language subdomains or subdirectories.
So far, we’ve seen that ChatGPT is a potentially useful tool for translating smaller chunks of text presented in common languages. While its translations tend to be satisfactory, using pivot prompting and back translation tactics can help improve its translation performance.
Pivot prompting is a technique that involves first translating the source text into a language that ChatGPT knows well, then “pivoting” by translating the translation into your intended target language.
Let’s say we want to translate the Welsh sentence “Helo, sut ydych chi?” into English. Welsh isn’t an especially common language, so we may benefit from “pivoting” into a more commonly used language, such as French, first.
We’d therefore:
Pivot prompting can improve ChatGPT’s translation accuracy as you don’t directly translate your text from a low-resource language on which the chatbot may not have been sufficiently trained. Instead, the chatbot translates the source text with reference to an intermediary language for which it can generate translations more easily.
That said, pivot prompting may introduce other translation errors if mistranslations occur during the intermediate translation step. That’s because ChatGPT will work off a different text to produce the translation in your target language rather than the original source text itself.
It’s just like playing a game of Telephone, where the initial message may inadvertently get modified as it travels from person to person!
When using ChatGPT to translate text, you could also have it first translate your text into the target language, before translating it back to the source language.
Let’s say we want ChatGPT to translate the English sentence “Hello, how are you?” into Spanish. So we submitted our request, and ChatGPT returned the phrase “Hola, ¿cómo estás?”
We then got ChatGPT to translate “Hola, ¿cómo estás?” back into English. And here, it gave us our initial English sentence of “Hello, how are you?”
Carrying out such a back translation (or “reverse translation”) can help you double-check the accuracy of ChatGPT’s provided translation. This is especially true if you're more familiar with the source language than the target one.
But as with pivot prompting, back translation introduces extra steps in the translation process. Take care that you don’t introduce translation errors into each of these steps!
The general rule of thumb in machine translation is to provide input, or prompts, that are as clear, direct, and specific as possible. Doing so helps the natural language processing (NLP) tool understand what you’re asking of it and generate a more accurate translation.
But with a more context-aware and flexible translation tool like ChatGPT, following this general rule of thumb may lead to less effective translations in situations such as:
After getting a text translation, how do you know whether it’s suitable for use? You don’t want a situation where you put resources toward obtaining a translation but fail to get the results you’re looking for.
This could be where, for example, your multilingual website is so poorly translated that your target customers can’t understand it.
There are various methods of assessing the machine translation quality (including that for ChatGPT translation), both via automatic and human means. We’ll take a look at some of them in this next section.
As you review these methods, consider which you may want to use to assess the quality of your machine translations. Undertaking a combination of automatic and human evaluation methods will tend to provide a more comprehensive assessment of translation quality rather than relying solely on automatic or human methods alone.
In automatic translation evaluation, you’d use metrics and algorithms that automatically score the quality of the resulting translation. These include:
As the name suggests, human translation evaluation methods involve having human evaluators rate translations according to more subjective considerations. Such methods include:
ChatGPT’s ability to understand context, and workshop its translations through back-and-forth interactions with you, can make it a good alternative to using a machine translation provider for simple translation requests. This is especially true when you use targeted prompts, and tactics such as pivot prompting, to refine its translations.
But if you have specialized translation needs, relying on a translation solution purpose-built for such needs may be the way to go. Take the situation of website translation, for instance, which typically involves translating large volumes of text for displaying online.
ChatGPT translation prompts are limited to about 3,000 words each – or about only one to three blog posts’ worth of words. If your website has many more words than that, repeatedly copying and pasting chunks of website copy into the AI chatbot for translation purposes can be tedious.
Meanwhile, machine translation providers may be able to translate all the content on a website at once, but there’s still the issue of moving the translations to your multilingual website.
The ideal solution here is to use Weglot, which will not only provide high-quality website translations but also add them to your website for you. Using the Visual Editor, you can preview how the translations will appear on your website and edit them – within the context of your website’s design – on the spot.
Weglot then displays them under language subdomains or subdirectories, depending on how you want to organize your content for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes. Other features, such as automatic hreflang tag implementation, also help give your website the best chances of getting seen by multilingual search engine users within your target audience.
Explore how Weglot can help you achieve seamless website translation by signing up for a 10-day free trial here.