Optimising ChatGPT for creativity in literary translation: A case study from English into Dutch, Chinese, Catalan and Spanish
Published in
arXiv.org(2025)External Links:
TL
TL;DR
It is 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.
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).
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