Maybe it was lucky that I couldn’t renew my DeepL Pro account because I don’t live in the EU. My experiments with ChatGPT show it’s at least as good as the mature DeepL system.
Is ChatGPT good enough for translating into German or English? I wanted to know for certain, so I fed various texts of mine through both systems for English translation. I took several paragraphs from this note and ran them through DeepL and ChatGPT. Then I compared the results in Visual Code.
At first glance, the translations are visually quite close. Linguistically, I don’t see any glaring differences either. For my taste, both translations are good enough.
ChatGPT’s big advantage is that I can improve the translation further if I have the freedom to deviate from the original (“please edit the following text:”). Of course, the edited version needs more careful checking. The texts become smoother but lose their rough edges. That’s not necessarily advantageous.
Here are some examples of differences in the translations:
DeepL vs. ChatGPT:
- “not only is it” vs. “It’s not just”
- “i.e” vs. “that is”
- “and thus” vs. “and therefore”
- “drastic experience” vs. “life-changing experience”
- “collects dust” vs. “gathers dust”
- “you do need receptivity” vs. “you do need the willingness to embrace it”
- “how much time goes into preheating it” vs. “how much time do we spend preheating it”
- “need one of those cabinets when we hardly ever eat meat” vs. “need one of those cabinets if we hardly eat meat”
- “the grills don’t clean very well?” vs. “the grills are not easy to clean?”
- “I don’t have to work for the stuff, I’d rather be walking by the sea” vs. “I don’t have to work for these things, but I can take a walk with my family by the sea”
You can see it’s the nuances that matter. I’m no English linguist, but I prefer ChatGPT’s translations about 80 per cent of the time.
I can live with that being a matter of taste. So it wasn’t such a disaster losing my DeepL Pro account after all.
Originally published auf Deutsch at reinergaertner.de (est. 1997, older than Google). AI helped translate this. I helped introduce the errors.