I'm sure it'll be doing that in five years, but not now.
One interesting thing is that's it's nondeterministic, so sometimes 'For chrissakes' turns to ちくしょう (Damn!) but sometimes to クリスのために (for Chris' sake). Sometimes 'the goddamn door' turns into クソドア ('shit door'), sometimes the goddamn changes the phrasing of the whole sentence instead. If you run it five times and take the best sentences out of all five runs it's probably quite good. Maybe prompting would help too, I said "idiomatic Japanese" but it still usually translated it in a very "foreigner Japanese" way typical of US drama/movie translations.
In "Can GPT-4 translate literature?" (Mar 18, 2023) [https://youtu.be/5KKDCp3OaMo?t=377], Tom Gally, a former professional translator and current professor at the University of Tokyo, said:
> …the point is, to my eye at least, the the basic quality of the translation [from Japanese to English] is as good as a human might do, and with some relatively mild editing by a sensitive human editor, it could be turned into a novel that would be readable and enjoyable.
Like he says, there's lots of ambiguity in Japanese that needs to be handled, gender not being specified until later, etc. and an editor would need to spend time going over it - but it saves months of traditional work. There are words and _concepts_ that are hard to translate, there are cultural issues, dialects, slang, registers. So yeah it'll make the media accessible, but it won't be as a good as a skilled translator.
I mean i can if you want (chinese though) but enough people lie on the internet.
I'm a native speaker of Chinese, but not a professional translator.
This.
GPT/ChatGPT is able to even translate between different "accents" or dialects of the same language. For example it can give you the same sentence in Mexican, Argentinean or Peruvian Spanish.
Example:
Me: Give me a sentence in spanish that is different in Mexican, Argentinean and Peruvian Spanish. Write the sentence in each dialect.
ChatGPT: Mexican Spanish: "¿Qué onda, güey? ¿Cómo estás?" Argentinean Spanish: "¿Qué onda, boludo? ¿Cómo estás?" Peruvian Spanish: "¿Qué tal, causa? ¿Cómo estás?"
These sentences mean "What's up, dude? How are you?" in English. The primary difference is the slang term used for "dude" or "friend" in each dialect: "güey" in Mexican Spanish, "boludo" in Argentinean Spanish, and "causa" in Peruvian Spanish.
Similar to how a lot of swear words work in many languages.
It's interesting to see how what matters is not the word, but the intention behind it. At the end we are trying to communicate meaning, and words are just one of our tools to do it.
Of Course i don't know the data for GPT-4
Mandarin isn't the second language I speak but I officially compared with it because I wanted to test also with a model that had more equivalent corpus training than the very lopsided gpt models. And Chinese/English is the only combo that has a model of note in that regard.
and you can see talk on English/Japanese here - https://youtu.be/5KKDCp3OaMo?t=377