On the flip side, Google Translate has been refined over the years and is incredibly precise.
This begs the question: Can ChatGPT beat Google Translate at its own game?
What Sets Google Translate and ChatGPT Apart in Their Approaches to Translation?
Kishan Vyas / How-To Geek
Google Translate is a purpose-built tool for language translation.
One of the main selling points of machine translation is that they take context into account when translating.
On the other hand, ChatGPT is a jot down ofGenerative Pre-trained Transformer(GPT).
It processed swaths of data to learn how human languages work naturally with minimal input from its creators.
Similar to NMTs, GPTs also have the goal of predicting a word sequence based on the provided context.
Thanks to training, ChatGPT has a broad understanding of grammar and the meaning of words.
In theory, Google Translate should win this head-to-head comparison because it’s trained for translation-specific tasks.
So, let’s see how they perform when given something to work with.
To give an example, here’s a part of the synopsis of a German book calledWovon Wir Traumen.
The same is true if we venture to translate from English to Bosnian.
Granted, this didn’t happen with every single phrase I tried.
However, ChatGPT often struggles with context, as it lacks an understanding of the nuances of a language.
This leads to misconstrued translations due to a poor choice of words.
Granted, this didn’t happen with every single phrase I ran through the two tools.
ChatGPT managed to translate several phrases correctlyjust like Google Translatebefore I found an example that didn’t work well.
Here’s an example using the popular German idiom “Den Bock zum Gartner machen.”
As you’re free to see, both ChatGPT and Google Translate translated this gardener goat idiom literally.
Dialects are another area where ChatGPT excels, whereas Google Translate tends to fall short.
This can be extended to all non-standard language variants and specialized languages likepidgins and creoles.
To give you an example, I ran the phrase “While wetin dey happen?”
fromNigerian Pidgin, meaning “What is going on?”
without specifying what language it is.
The same is true for niche slang.
Still, Google Translate is more precise and made fewer errors in my tests overall.
Only turn to ChatGPT if Google Translate gives you something that doesn’t sound right.
you could already use ChatGPT today to translate most things with a high degree of accuracy.
Or maybe it’ll get fully integrated intoGemini, and we’ll have the best of both worlds.
