Comment by lurking_swe

IMO chatgpt is a much better translator. Especially if you’re using one of their normal models like 5.1. I’ve used it many times with an obscure and difficult slavic language that i’m fluent in for example, and chatgpt nailed it whereas google translate sounded less natural.

The big difference? I could easily prompt the LLM with “i’d like to translate the following into language X. For context this is a reply to their email on topic Y, and Z is a female.”

Doing even a tiny bit of prompting will easily get you better results than google translate. Some languages have words with multiple meanings and the context of the sentence/topic is crucial. So is gender in many languages! You can’t provide any hints like that to google translate, especially if you are starting with an un-gendered language like English.

I do still use google translate though. When my phone is offline, or translating very long text. LLM’s perform poorly with larger context windows.