This was a brief exchange between myself and ChatGPT, which I have been utilising for the first time on a new translation project.
The points are self-explanatory (please excuse the typo in the screenshot), but as the risk of voicing an unpopular view, I'd like to hear what the community thinks about translation software programs in terms of their pros and cons, and the need (if any) for them.
I see your point. The discussion you started with the AI tool is very intersting. As far as my experience in the legal field is concerned, I can say that unassisted machine-driven work is always disappointing. AI gives often rise to instances of hallucinations. Moreover, it is not generally capable of proposing correct equivalents, given the many nuances arising from different legal traditions and systems. Therefore, I always suggest using AI or machine translation together with other tools, such as corpora. There are scholars who proposed APE (automated post-editing), whereby machine-driven translations are automatically post-edited by using machine-learning alghorithms which are trained to detect and correct errors (do Carno et al. 2020),
In your images, if I remember well, the chatbot argues that it is able to grasp language subtleties. However, at the time being (as regards the English-Italian language pair), chatbots are not capable of rendering puns or playwords. There are studies in this regard. Some scholars managed to develop a CAT tools that renders puns from German into English (and vice-versa) (Kolb and Miller 2022). If you ask a chatbot to render a pun, it fails dramatically. In September 2024, I prompt ChatGPT and Gemini to perform the following: a man is seeing a photo with a woman pulling the cord of a tower bell. That man does not remember or recognise the woman and says "um, doesn't ring the bell". Translate the statement in quotes into Italian and maintain the pun. The result was a disaster. I haven't checked now, maybe things have changed.
Carmen Wrede This was Gemini's answer (I don't have ChatGPT's any more, sorry):
Answer: "Beh, non suona la campana."
[back-translation: "well, the bell doesn't play/ring"]
This is a literal translation, it makes no sense in Italian.
Patrizia Giampieri Happens to me too when I do not know englisch terms. Sometimes I tend to make a 1 to 1 translation... like for example "Transportgleichung" -> "transportation equation", when the real term is simply "transport equation"... In those cases AI laughs about me too saying I speak physics like that guy from Ocean's Twelve who tries to fake a french accent... So obviously AI laughs about humans too...
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