Ask ChatGPT – June 14, 2023

My Conversations with ChatGPT
Machine Translation (MT) and translations generated by AI have brought about a paradigm shift in the translation industry. The output of MT will continue to improve, especially when associated with clients’ translation memories and human editing. Language Service Providers are adapting and are including MT in their processes, when MT is applicable. While linguists will continue to be essential in the process, their role will shift from that of translators to validators of content generated by MT. At Excel Translations, we wanted to know what AI thinks about all of this and decided to have an open conversation on the matter with ChatGPT. I will regularly publish a question and ChatGPT’s response, uncensored.

QUESTION 7:

Which documents are best suited for machine translation?

ChatGPT’s response:

Machine translation is well-suited for documents that meet certain criteria:

1. Structured and Standardized Content: Machine translation performs best with documents that have a consistent structure and follow standardized formats. Examples include product descriptions, technical specifications, user manuals, and legal contracts.
2. Large Volumes of Text: Machine translation is particularly efficient when dealing with a large volume of text. It can quickly process and translate extensive documents, saving time and effort compared to manual translation.
3. Non-sensitive and Non-confidential Content: Machine translation is most suitable for non-sensitive information that doesn’t involve confidential or proprietary data. Publicly available content such as news articles, website content, and general information materials can be effectively translated using machine translation.
4. Information with Moderate Complexity: Machine translation performs better with text that has moderate complexity and limited ambiguity. Documents with straightforward language, clear syntax, and minimal use of idiomatic expressions or technical jargon tend to yield more accurate results.
5. Content with Sufficient Linguistic Resources: Machine translation benefits from a substantial amount of bilingual or parallel data available for training. If there is ample reference material in the source and target languages, machine translation systems can leverage that data to improve translation quality.

However, it’s important to remember that even in the cases where machine translation is suitable, post-editing by human translators is often recommended to ensure accuracy, fluency, and adherence to specific language requirements and nuances.