Comment by emeth

2 years ago

I've used ChatGPT 3.5 (not 4, too expensive) to translate most of the Latin writings of Jerome, Ambrose, and Ambrosiaster (from Migne's Patrologia Latina) - the translations have been put in this repo in the public domain:

https://github.com/HistoricalChristianFaith/Writings-Databas...

Some takeaways:

- ChatGPT did excellent with about 3 sentences max at a time. Exceeding 3 sentences would cause it to often truncate the response (e.g. translating 3ish of 5 sentences, or hallucinating more).

- ChatGPT would originally return the translation, sometimes randomly prefixed with a variant of "The translation is" and sometimes wrapped in quotes, othertimes not. Using the function interface to ChatGPT eliminated this problem.

- When it comes to quotations from Bible verses, ChatGPT sometimes "embellished" (not sure what else to call it). E.g. if part of Ephesians 2:7 is quoted in Latin, in the English ChatGPT would sometimes insert Ephesians 2:7-8 in full.

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emeth

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idopmstuff  2 years ago

I don't really understand what the value in posting these kinds of takeaways about using GPT3.5 here is. GPT4 is significantly better, and improved models are coming. There's just not a lot of point to benchmarking 3.5 when likely every issue you've pointed out is solved by 4.

  • emeth  2 years ago

    Average cost to translate an entire work in that repo via GPT3.5 = ~$2

    Average cost to translate an entire work in that repo via GPT4 = ~$40

    For a side-project, one is feasible to scale, and one ain't.