I had the suspicion that this was more of a problem of missing context than lacking meta linguistic abilities. A text can be translated as "what's the meaning of the words" and "what would a person/character say in an other language in the same situation", and it's not in the prompt which one the user wants, but only in their head.

So I asked my free chatGPT mentioning that it is for a book but it failed too:

> For a book, a natural English translation would be:

> “Just three words: you are not alone.”

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a2d06a3-a3b4-83ed-9e0a-8ec07e05e3...

It even repeated the context. So it seems to me now that it indeed still lacks meta linguistic abilities. (I don't think that this proves anything meaningful about AI.)

I wonder if “Just 3 words: you’re not alone” would have been acceptable. :)