Translating a book with ChatGPT
Right before the turn of the year, I started to translate a friend’s book from Brazilian Portuguese, into American English. Being an avid reader, I was sure that hiring a regular translator to do the work, would not yield a good result.
The action in the book mostly takes place in Rio de Janeiro and involves local police, Federal Police and criminal organizations. There is just too much cultural difference between the day to day in Rio to what Americans are used to, to confuse the reader. There would be a need to make slight changes to how things are named and referred to. If a person has to stop to think about what is being described, you’ve already taken them out of the flow of the story.
Considering everything else I do, there was no way I would be able to type out the entire book, while translating it. So, I decided to run the chapters through ChatGPT, and then go through them, making the proper and necessary adjustments. Right at the start, I was amazed by how good the translation was, even when using ChatGPT 3.5.
Creating a custom GPT was a game changer, as was being able to move on to CPT-4. The work would flow much better, as I could place in the GPT’s custom instructions, small details that it would then always get right, instead of my having to correct them by hand.
Moving to GPT-4o, was an absolute quality of life improvement. Not because the translation was any better. After all, it was already pretty amazing, but because it could now handle the entire chapter in one go. The previous versions would frequently fail to complete the translation, midway, when fed the entire chapter, so I had to cut it up into smaller pieces. While it worked well, it was cumbersome.
CPT-4o now allows me to feed the entire chapter and get the initial translation in a few seconds. The translation is good enough that you could read the book and enjoy the story, though some stuff that require cultural references would be missed, and you might find some of the dialog weird.
It is not weird because it is wrong, it is weird because you don’t expect a teenager to talk that way, or because the translation doesn’t make sense in American culture. To retain the meaning, sometimes the translation cannot be a direct translation, as that refers to aspects of the Brazilian, or more specifically, the Carioca culture of Rio de Janeiro.
Even giving the custom GPT the background of what the novel is about, and where most of its scenes take place, and to what language we are translating, the AI is not yet up to the challenge of making the cultural adaptations.
While I am quite sure that in the not too distant future, the AI will be able to do the whole job, I am delighted with the results it’s given me this far. This week I should complete the translation of the final chapters of the book. I could never have accomplished as much as I did, with as little effort as I had to put in, without ChatGPT.