What is the Best Way for ChatGPT to Translate Poetry?

Shanshan Wang, Derek Wong, Jingming Yao, Lidia Chao

Abstract
Machine translation (MT) has historically faced significant challenges when applied to literary works, particularly in the domain of poetry translation. The advent of Large Language Models such as ChatGPT holds potential for innovation in this field. This study examines ChatGPT’s capabilities in English-Chinese poetry translation tasks, utilizing targeted prompts and small sample scenarios to ascertain optimal performance. Despite promising outcomes, our analysis reveals persistent issues in the translations generated by ChatGPT that warrant attention. To address these shortcomings, we propose an Explanation-Assisted Poetry Machine Translation (EAPMT) method, which leverages monolingual poetry explanation as a guiding information for the translation process. Furthermore, we refine existing evaluation criteria to better suit the nuances of modern poetry translation. We engaged a panel of professional poets for assessments, complemented evaluations by using GPT-4. The results from both human and machine evaluations demonstrate that our EAPMT method outperforms traditional translation methods of ChatGPT and the existing online systems. This paper validates the efficacy of our method and contributes a novel perspective to machine-assisted literary translation.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.756
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14025–14043
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.756
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.756
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shanshan Wang, Derek Wong, Jingming Yao, and Lidia Chao. 2024. What is the Best Way for ChatGPT to Translate Poetry?. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 14025–14043, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
What is the Best Way for ChatGPT to Translate Poetry? (Wang et al., ACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2024.acl-long.756.pdf
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