Shuxiang Du


2025

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Optimising ChatGPT for creativity in literary translation: A case study from English into Dutch, Chinese, Catalan and Spanish
Shuxiang Du | Ana Guerberof Arenas | Antonio Toral | Kyo Gerrits | Josep Marco Borillo
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XX: Volume 1

This study examines the variability of ChatGPT’s machine translation (MT) outputs across six different configurations in four languages, with a focus on creativity in a literary text. We evaluate GPT translations in different text granularity levels, temperature settings and prompting strategies with a Creativity Score formula. We found that prompting ChatGPT with a minimal instruction yields the best creative translations, with Translate the following text into [TG] creatively at the temperature of 1.0 outperforming other configurations and DeepL in Spanish, Dutch, and Chinese. Nonetheless, ChatGPT consistently underperforms compared to human translation (HT). All the code and data are available at Repository URL will be provided with camera-ready version.