ChatGPT: Your Personal Assistant for Translation Tasks

If you are a translator, you know that there are a ton of tasks that make up your daily work but do not actually add to the overall value of your craft. Emails, proofreading, and quality control often take up so much of your day that you have little time to focus on actually transforming your source text into an accurate and appropriate representation for your target audience. What if you had a tool that could do all those tedious tasks that take up your precious time? 

Fortunately, now you do! ChatGPT is a powerful language model that was developed by OpenAI and has recently been making waves in every industry around. Built from the foundation of GPT-3, which is the largest neural network ever created, ChatGPT has been trained on a vast amount of data (300 billion word fragments!), making it capable of generating human-like text and completing various language-based tasks. And one of the most significant capabilities of ChatGPT is its ability to assist with translation tasks.

But what does that mean? Can GPT-3 translate texts, too?

While it does have the ability to work with two languages at the same time and translate text, it does not possess the in-depth cultural or linguistic knowledge to provide accurate translations. Therefore, using GPT-3 as a machine translation tool is not suggested. It is best to leave the actual translation process up to humans and certified machine translation models. However, ChatGPT can help with many other aspects of the translation process as well as take care of several of those monotonous tasks required of any self-employed professional. Let’s take a look at these now and see how you can translate with GPT-3.

 

Help With Emails & Paperwork

It’s no secret that exchanges with clients are the lifeblood of any translator’s career. They are often the primary means by which a translator receives assignments and are vital in forming working relationships between translators and clients. Unfortunately, however, writing emails can sometimes be a long process, which takes away from the time language professionals need to focus on the work of translation itself. ChatGPT can help format, organize, and generate content, allowing translators to efficiently and effectively communicate with clients. Long gone are the days of spending hours in front of email, trying to come up with the best way to formulate a phrase or summarize a thought. ChatGPT can do that for you! In fact, according to one study, the time spent on routine paperwork can be reduced by 40% with AI tools. Pretty impressive, right?

 

Proofread & Clarify Source Text

Have you ever translated a source text that was riddled with errors or confusing sentence structure? The brain power and time required to interpret poorly written work may be one of the biggest struggles of translators today. Fortunately, GPT-3 can pre-process and reformulate text from almost any language, making the next step of the translation process that much easier for language professionals. It can also answer questions about terminology, specialized processes, and industry lingo that other tools may not always be able to master. Just like machine translation has augmented translation for the language services industry, ChatGPT will do its part in streamlining translation work and help reduce errors, misunderstandings, and inconsistencies.

 

Post-Edit Machine Translations

Another advantage of using ChatGPT for translation is that it can assist with post-editing of machine translations. The model can provide suggestions to improve the fluency of the generated text, making it sound more natural and less like a machine translation. It can even modify the syntax of a sentence or rewrite the target text to adapt to a particular voice or style. One example of this is the tool’s expertise at imitating Donald Trump’s manner of speech. If it has the proper integrated data, it can do uncanny impressions of individuals and take on a number of “personalities.” This is particularly helpful when translators need to target a specific audience and speak to them in their own words. Furthermore, ChatGPT is a wonderful tool for finding synonyms of a particular word, which reduces redundant phrases and enriches the lexical aspect of the text. This can be especially useful for translations that are more creative in nature, as less time can be spent on trying to find that perfect word or create an aesthetic outcome.

 

Final Thoughts 

In conclusion, ChatGPT (GPT-3) is a powerful tool that can assist with a wide variety of translation tasks. It can be fine-tuned to take over the more monotonous aspects of paperwork and emails, but it also has the incredible ability to pre-process text and assist with the post-editing of machine translations. This makes ChatGPT a valuable tool for anyone looking to translate text quickly, accurately, and fluently. As technology continues to improve, we can expect to see even more advanced and accurate language translations using GPT-3 and other similar models in the near future.