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.

The application of machine translation in the field of poetry has always presented significant challenges. Conventional machine translation techniques are inadequate for capturing and translating the unique style of poetry. The absence of a parallel poetry corpus and the distinctive structure of poetry further restrict the effectiveness of traditional methods. This paper introduces a zero-shot method that is capable of translating poetry style without the need for a large-scale training corpus. Specifically, we treat poetry translation as a standard machine translation problem and subsequently inject the poetry style upon completion of the translation process. Our injection model only requires back-translation and easily obtainable monolingual data, making it a low-cost solution. We conducted experiments on three translation directions and presented automatic and human evaluations, demonstrating that our proposed method outperforms existing online systems and other competitive baselines. These results validate the feasibility and potential of our proposed approach and provide new prospects for poetry translation.