What is the Best Way for ChatGPT to Translate Poetry?

TL;DR

This paper explores how ChatGPT can be optimized for translating poetry between English and Chinese, proposing a new explanation-guided method that improves translation quality as validated by human and AI evaluations.

Contribution

It introduces the EAPMT method that uses monolingual poetry explanations to enhance ChatGPT's translation of poetry, advancing literary machine translation techniques.

Findings

EAPMT outperforms traditional ChatGPT translation methods.

Human and AI evaluations confirm the effectiveness of EAPMT.

Refined evaluation criteria better capture poetry translation quality.

Abstract

Machine translation (MT) has historically faced significant challenges when applied to literary works, particularly in the domain of poetry translation. The advent of Large Language Models such as ChatGPT holds potential for innovation in this field. This study examines ChatGPT's capabilities in English-Chinese poetry translation tasks, utilizing targeted prompts and small sample scenarios to ascertain optimal performance. Despite promising outcomes, our analysis reveals persistent issues in the translations generated by ChatGPT that warrant attention. To address these shortcomings, we propose an Explanation-Assisted Poetry Machine Translation (EAPMT) method, which leverages monolingual poetry explanation as a guiding information for the translation process. Furthermore, we refine existing evaluation criteria to better suit the nuances of modern poetry translation. We engaged a panel of professional poets for assessments, complemented evaluations by using GPT-4. The results from both human and machine evaluations demonstrate that our EAPMT method outperforms traditional translation methods of ChatGPT and the existing online systems. This paper validates the efficacy of our method and contributes a novel perspective to machine-assisted literary translation.