Comment by chii
4 days ago
> said what they were trying to say in Spanish and then had ChatGPT convert it to English. It was everywhere.
i'm just so surprised they'd use chatgpt to do this, when it's quite as easily (and perhaps faster) to use google translate.
I've had better experience with LLMs translating than any bespoke translation tool, oddly enough. LLMs seemingly have a very good handle on regional varieties. As an example, I've never found a good translator for Lebanese/Syrian Arabic dialects, but ChatGPT was able to easily translate for me, even getting right some lesser used rural accent quirks which I didn't even know how to translate (similar to something like "y'all" in english).
To be fair, I wasn't using it in the way the parent comment described, for me I said: "this person speaking Lebanese/Syrian Arabic said something that sounded like [try my best to replicate the sentence]. What did they most likely mean?" and got a pretty much spot-on answer.
I wonder if this ability translates to other languages, but I wouldn't be able to tell. My Arabic is "good enough" to tell that the translations I got were good, but I'd be interested to here from someone who knows more if, for example fuzhounese translation is any good.
> i'm just so surprised they'd use chatgpt to do this, when it's quite as easily (and perhaps faster) to use google translate.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762