Comment by benbreen

Well, that's just it - I use Google Translate all the time to translate historical texts, and for whatever reason, GPT-4 and Claude both work better. Since I deal with texts that feature archaic orthography like the long s (ſ) the main advantage over Google Translate is that LLMs can make educated guesses about what a word should be. But even in terms of pure translation ability — assuming all orthographic issues have been corrected — the LLMs do a better job in the languages I've tested and which I can read (early modern Portuguese, Spanish and French, plus Latin).

The post by David Bell which I linked to gets into this for French - I agree with him that ChatGPT (I guess he was using GPT 3.5) has a tendency to "overtranslate." But it is super impressive as a translator overall IMO: https://davidabell.substack.com/p/playing-around-with-machin...