Optimising ChatGPT for creativity in literary translation: A case study from English into Dutch, Chinese, Catalan and Spanish

2025/04/25 by Shuxiang Du, Sizhuo Du, Ana Guerberof Arenas +8 · 1 voice
Computer Science · Materials Science · Medicine · #AI in Service Interactions #Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education #Machine Learning in Materials Science #cs.CL

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2504.18221

Abstract

This study examines the variability of Chat-GPT 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).

Citations

• Investigating Length Issues in Document-level Machine Translation
• A Survey of GPT-3 Family Large Language Models Including ChatGPT and GPT-4
• Large language models effectively leverage document-level context for literary translation, but critical errors persist
• Towards Making the Most of ChatGPT for Machine Translation
• How Good Are GPT Models at Machine Translation? A Comprehensive Evaluation
• CometKiwi: IST-Unbabel 2022 Submission for the Quality Estimation Shared Task
• The Impact of Post-editing and Machine Translation on Creativity and Reading Experience
• COMET: A Neural Framework for MT Evaluation
• Comparison of Diverse Decoding Methods from Conditional Language Models

Discussions

• Post 4/4: For those interested, check out the original paper here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18221 and a detailed blog breakdown: https://theministryofai.org. Don't forget to follow for the latest br [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]

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