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Comment by thrdbndndn | Hacker News Reader

The only thing I still use ChatGPT semi-frequently is to translate stuff, mainly from Japanese to my native language or English.

And I'm surprised how often it failed to follow the basic instruction of

    Please translate the following paragraph to X-language.
    (Paragraph in Japanese.)

And I have to say "Please translate the following paragraph to X-language" every single time -- I can't just say, "hey, please just translate paragraphs I give from now on." It won't follow it for very long before it starts to do other random stuff or tries to follow the content of the Japanese paragraphs I was trying to get translated.

Any clue how to make it better? I use 3.5 FWIW.

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Set the system prompt to:

    Translate the user-provided text from English to Japanese.

In the user message, provide only the text.

Testing it on your comment, it works well even with GPT-3.5.

Even better is to give the instruction in Japanese (at least with earlier models).

This doesn’t help you probably, but the difference between 3.5 and 4 when giving it instructions to follow is huge. I encourage everybody to use GPT-4 when possible, the differences are night and day.

I also read Japanese (novels) a lot. If you don't mind using an extension, I recommend Sider [1], so that you can select texts and use the Sider popup to translate it. Custom prompt for translation is also supported. Cons would be that Sider does not support translation history, so you need copy&paste to save it (you can also login instead; I've never done that though).

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sider-chatgpt-side...

Papago used to be the gold standard for Korean translation. Gpt4 crushes.

Is there a reason why you want to use ChatGPT for translation, rather than a purpose-made translation AI such as DeepL?

A model built for translation and nothing else isn't going to get distracted and wander off like a general purpose LLM is prone to doing.

Because DeepL's quality, unfortunately, is still miles behind ChatGPT. Especially when the target language isn't English.

I can read some Japanese, so I know it when it's very off. It often translates thing into totally opposite meanings, or omit entire sentence within a long paragraph. I trust broken results in Google Translate more than DeepL's when it comes to Japanese, as it's at least more literal.

DeepL also has an infamous issue where when you live-update your input (by adding more sentences), it will repeat the same sentence over and over again. You have to restart from scratch to avoid this issue.

> Because DeepL's quality, unfortunately, is still miles behind ChatGPT. Especially when the target language isn't English.

I think this is language-dependent. DeepL is a German company and, in my experience, their German translations are way better than Google's.

I switched from DeepL to ChatGPT the moment DeepL introduced a paywall after some usage. But honestly, I really liked DeepL, it always worked well and far better than Google Translate for my use cases.

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