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I tried translating something from English to German (my native language) yesterday with ChatGPT4 and compared it to Microsoft Translate, Google Translate and D

I tried translating something from English to German (my native language) yesterday with ChatGPT4 and compared it to Microsoft Translate, Google Translate and DeepL. My ranking: 1. ChatGPT4 - flawless translation. I was blown away 2. DeepL - very close, but one mistake 3. Google Translate - good translation, some mistakes 4. Microsoft Translate - bad translation, many mistakes I can understand the panic.

davidktr 4y ago
Fellow German here. Funny thing about DeepL: It translates "pathetisch" as "pathetic". For example: "Das war eine pathetische Rede." -> "That was a pathetic speech." I guess we have to get used to software redefining the meaning of words. It was kind of funny when that happened regarding Google Maps / neighborhood names, but with LLMs it's a different ballgame.
- pohuing 4y ago
  Pathetic can mean emotional in English as well. Though I only discovered that by reading the dictionary. For anyone who doesn't speak German, pathetisch means with pathos, impassioned.
  - harimau777 4y ago
    This strikes me as a good example of how nuanced language can be. A native English speaker probably would only use "pathetic" to mean "emotional" if the emotions were specifically negative. They also would use pathetic to describe someone experiencing non-emotional suffering such as injury or poverty. Therefore, a native English speaker probably would not use "pathetic" to mean "emotional" in everyday writing. However, I could definitely see someone using it to mean emotional when they were being more poetic. For example, I could see someone calling an essay on the emotional toll of counseling "The Pathetic Class" in order to imply that social workers are a class that society has tasked with confronting negative emotions.
  - pyuser583 4y ago
    That’s a definition you see as technical term in Ancient Philosophy. Beyond literal translations from Greek, it doesn’t come up much.
    - xdennis 4y ago
      Yeah, if someone gives a heartfelt speech at a wedding and I call it pathetic, I don't think people will appreciate it.
  - xdennis 4y ago
    > For anyone who doesn't speak German, pathetisch means with pathos, impassioned. It's the same in Romanian, and I guess many other languages. Many of the common words of European languages are derived from Greek and Latin, and where the meaning has diverged in English, now (because of its ubiquity) these false friends are being realigned to mean what they do in English.
    - mr_toad 4y ago
      In Ancient Greek pathos also meant a kind of “existence is suffering”, so you could say that the English meaning of pathetic has come full circle.
- sinuhe69 4y ago
  I think we should not undervalue DeepL. Not only its default-translation is already very good, it allows users to select different alternatives and remember these preferences, too. Which is not possible, at least not easy with GPT. And as with anything else, with the time it will get improved, too. LLM is not the answer to all linguistic problems.
- davidkuennen 4y ago
  The most amazing thing about ChatGPT translation is, that you can even instruct it how to translate. For example "dutzen" and "sietzen" in German. I just simply tell it how it should do it and it did. Absolutely amazing. It's like actually working with a real translator.
  - siva7 4y ago
    That's something i'm really sorry for but those jobs will be likely the first to fade away, there is a whole university faculty dedicated to the profession of the language translator where i live.
    - yieldcrv 4y ago
      goodbye to teaching English in Asia! come on home ya'll!
- DangerousPie 4y ago
  Another German here, and I have to admit I would have actually translated "pathetisch" as "pathetic" as well. I guess my German vocabulary has suffered quite a bit over the years of living abroad.
zirgs 4y ago
Does it translate hate speech too?
- groffee 4y ago
  "In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
- blurbleblurble 4y ago
  Of course it can
  - zirgs 4y ago
    ButI thought ChatGPT has guardrails that prevent it from outputting hate speech, praising certain politicians and so on.
epups 4y ago
I'm actually not sure what will become of tools like DeepL. Whatever edge they may have with dataset tuning and other tricks under the hood are likely superseded by a better architecture, which in turn requires a ton of capital to train. By the time they come up with a GPT4 equivalent, we will be using GPT5.
famouswaffles 4y ago
Tested these before GPT4 but 100%, Bi/Multi-lingual LLMs are the key to solving Machine Translation. https://github.com/ogkalu2/Human-parity-on-machine-translations https://github.com/ogkalu2/Human-parity-on-machine-translati...
AlanYx 4y ago
I've spent a lot of time comparing ChatGPT4 to DeepL Pro on English to French translation. ChatGPT4 is quite good, but not as consistently good as DeepL. But the interesting thing IMHO is the nature of the mistakes ChatGPT makes... often they're quite elementary mistakes (e.g., the occasional subject-adjective word order) while it gets the big picture right. Whereas DeepL is sometimes the reverse. ChatGPT also has the advantage of being able to tailor its output to a particular context, e.g., it can tailor legal translations to terms used in Canadian law rather than French law. However, for longer texts, I've noticed that ChatGPT will sometimes omit small parts of the source text from the translation, which is unfortunate. I have a colleague who says that the Mandarin translations done by ChatGPT are an order of magnitude better than DeepL though, which is interesting.

davidktr 4y ago

Fellow German here. Funny thing about DeepL: It translates "pathetisch" as "pathetic". For example: "Das war eine pathetische Rede." -> "That was a pathetic speech." I guess we have to get used to software redefining the meaning of words. It was kind of funny when that happened regarding Google Maps / neighborhood names, but with LLMs it's a different ballgame.

pohuing 4y ago
Pathetic can mean emotional in English as well. Though I only discovered that by reading the dictionary. For anyone who doesn't speak German, pathetisch means with pathos, impassioned.
- harimau777 4y ago
  This strikes me as a good example of how nuanced language can be. A native English speaker probably would only use "pathetic" to mean "emotional" if the emotions were specifically negative. They also would use pathetic to describe someone experiencing non-emotional suffering such as injury or poverty. Therefore, a native English speaker probably would not use "pathetic" to mean "emotional" in everyday writing. However, I could definitely see someone using it to mean emotional when they were being more poetic. For example, I could see someone calling an essay on the emotional toll of counseling "The Pathetic Class" in order to imply that social workers are a class that society has tasked with confronting negative emotions.
- pyuser583 4y ago
  That’s a definition you see as technical term in Ancient Philosophy. Beyond literal translations from Greek, it doesn’t come up much.
  - xdennis 4y ago
    Yeah, if someone gives a heartfelt speech at a wedding and I call it pathetic, I don't think people will appreciate it.
- xdennis 4y ago
  > For anyone who doesn't speak German, pathetisch means with pathos, impassioned. It's the same in Romanian, and I guess many other languages. Many of the common words of European languages are derived from Greek and Latin, and where the meaning has diverged in English, now (because of its ubiquity) these false friends are being realigned to mean what they do in English.
  - mr_toad 4y ago
    In Ancient Greek pathos also meant a kind of “existence is suffering”, so you could say that the English meaning of pathetic has come full circle.
sinuhe69 4y ago
I think we should not undervalue DeepL. Not only its default-translation is already very good, it allows users to select different alternatives and remember these preferences, too. Which is not possible, at least not easy with GPT. And as with anything else, with the time it will get improved, too. LLM is not the answer to all linguistic problems.
davidkuennen 4y ago
The most amazing thing about ChatGPT translation is, that you can even instruct it how to translate. For example "dutzen" and "sietzen" in German. I just simply tell it how it should do it and it did. Absolutely amazing. It's like actually working with a real translator.
- siva7 4y ago
  That's something i'm really sorry for but those jobs will be likely the first to fade away, there is a whole university faculty dedicated to the profession of the language translator where i live.
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    goodbye to teaching English in Asia! come on home ya'll!
DangerousPie 4y ago
Another German here, and I have to admit I would have actually translated "pathetisch" as "pathetic" as well. I guess my German vocabulary has suffered quite a bit over the years of living abroad.

zirgs 4y ago

Does it translate hate speech too?

groffee 4y ago
"In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
blurbleblurble 4y ago
Of course it can
- zirgs 4y ago
  ButI thought ChatGPT has guardrails that prevent it from outputting hate speech, praising certain politicians and so on.

epups 4y ago

I'm actually not sure what will become of tools like DeepL. Whatever edge they may have with dataset tuning and other tricks under the hood are likely superseded by a better architecture, which in turn requires a ton of capital to train. By the time they come up with a GPT4 equivalent, we will be using GPT5.

famouswaffles 4y ago

Tested these before GPT4 but 100%, Bi/Multi-lingual LLMs are the key to solving Machine Translation. https://github.com/ogkalu2/Human-parity-on-machine-translations https://github.com/ogkalu2/Human-parity-on-machine-translati...

AlanYx 4y ago

I've spent a lot of time comparing ChatGPT4 to DeepL Pro on English to French translation. ChatGPT4 is quite good, but not as consistently good as DeepL. But the interesting thing IMHO is the nature of the mistakes ChatGPT makes... often they're quite elementary mistakes (e.g., the occasional subject-adjective word order) while it gets the big picture right. Whereas DeepL is sometimes the reverse. ChatGPT also has the advantage of being able to tailor its output to a particular context, e.g., it can tailor legal translations to terms used in Canadian law rather than French law. However, for longer texts, I've noticed that ChatGPT will sometimes omit small parts of the source text from the translation, which is unfortunate. I have a colleague who says that the Mandarin translations done by ChatGPT are an order of magnitude better than DeepL though, which is interesting.