Optimising ChatGPT for creativity in literary translation: A case study from English into Dutch, Chinese, Catalan and Spanish
arXiv:2504.18221
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).
This paper has been accepted to the MT Summit 2025 to be held in Geneva on June 23-27 2025