HN Explorer

Tell HN: ChatGPT is Multilingual

9 points by omeid2 ↗ HN
Not only can it produce results in other languages, you can also prompt it in many languages.

Prompt: Translate this to many languages:

Something little spoken on the media about ChatGPT is that it is multilingual.

Response:

English: Something little spoken on the media about ChatGPT is that it is multilingual.

French: Quelque chose de peu parlé dans les médias à propos de ChatGPT est qu'il est multilingue.

German: Etwas, das in den Medien wenig erwähnt wird, über ChatGPT ist, dass es mehrsprachig ist.

Spanish: Algo poco hablado en los medios sobre ChatGPT es que es multilingüe.

Italian: Qualcosa di poco parlato sui media su ChatGPT è che è multilingue.

Chinese (Simplified): 在媒体上很少谈论 ChatGPT 的一点是它是多语言的。

Japanese: メディアではあまり話されない ChatGPT のことは、それは多言語であるということです。

Russian: Что-то мало говорится в СМИ о ChatGPT, что он многоязычный.

Arabic: شيء قليلا مثل على الإعلام عن ChatGPT هو أنه متعدد اللغات.

15 comments

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Ratavata
> Arabic: شيء قليلا مثل على الإعلام عن ChatGPT هو أنه متعدد اللغات.

That is a really bad translation from ChatGPT to arabic.

belval
It's likely due to the corpus though. It's multilingual, but the dataset they trained on is representative of "the Internet" so the latin languages (English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, etc...) are overly represented.
gus_massa
The Spanish version is not bad. (It's not perfect, but something like the autotranslation of Google.)

Can you test with a more complicated sentence like

The brown bull is in the tall barn.

It's harder because in the Spanish translation it must change the order of adjective and nouns, and also modify the adjectives according to the gender of the nouns.

The German translation looks bad, but I don't remember enough German to be sure.

belval
Same goes for French, seems like it's mostly doing word-per-word translation.

> Quelque chose de peu parlé dans les médias à propos de ChatGPT est qu'il est multilingue.

Quelque chose => Something

de peu => little

parlé => spoken

dans les médias => in the news

à propos => about

est qu'il est => is that it is

It's not necessarily "bad" but it reads like something someone who speaks English as a first language and learned some French would write.

sinuhe69
The German translation is hilariously as bad as the Google translation. And the exact duplication, word by word, makes it looks very suspiciously ;)

DeepL translation (a German-based AI company) is ways more natural: "Was in den Medien wenig über ChatGPT gesagt wird, ist, dass es mehrsprachig ist."

DonsDiscountGas
I've been talking to it in spanish to practice. Literally, just say something in spanish and it will respond in spanish. Regarding quality, I'm pretty sure it's about the same as english; technically correct just aggressively formal.

I asked it to play a game where it gave me a sentence in english, I translated it to spanish, and it graded my translation. I had to explain it about 5 times because it kept giving the spanish translation itself first. But eventually it got it. Nice tool for language learning, imho.

atmosx
Yes it is. Result are way off in Greek though. Much higher % of getting a totally wrong answer compared to English.
qup
For everyone saying the translations suck, the English sucks in the example, so it's no surprise.
throwaway675309
I was just going to say this, if they had prompted chat GPT with something like "please rewrite this in grammatically correct English", it likely would've worked for the English example.
omeid2
You're both from USA, I assume?
muzani
It's very good in Malay, though it has an Indonesian dialect.

It's bad at this particular sentence though: "Sesuatu yang sedikit dibicarakan di media tentang ChatGPT adalah ia multibahasa." (Something rarely spoken in media about ChatGPT is that is is multilingual)

Mine would be: "Media jarang membicarakan kebolehan ChatGPT berbicara dalam pelbagai bahasa" (Media rarely speaks of the ability of ChatGPT to speak in many types of languages)

It might just be that ChatGPT feels compelled to follow the exact same sentence structure and sometimes words just don't fit into those fields. If I translate a correct sentence into English as above, it sounds awkward as well.

ChatGPT does Malay poetry better than me, but it seems to be heavily biased towards love songs.

muzani
It does seem to be capable of explaining the Malay pun "Arnold Susahnakeja"(Arnold Hard-to-spell), with some training. Ironically, the training was to explain to it that not everyone can spell Schwarzenegger. Misspelling seems to be a more alien concept to it.
caruizdiaz
I speak guarani, an indigenous language spoken in Paraguay, and it's funny how it makes words out that sound like guarani but aren't really.

When I confront it on the mistake it just says it is sorry but keeps repeating them.

throwaway675309
"Something little spoken on the media about ChatGPT is that it is multilingual."

You should've at least started with somewhat intelligible English because now you're going to end up corrupting all the translations.

improved: "One little known fact about chat GPT that is rarely mentioned in the media is that it is multilingual"

trumbitta2
s/Qualcosa di poco parlato sui media su ChatGPT è che è multilingue./Una cosa di cui si parla poco sui media riguardo ChatGPT è che sia multilingua./