{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/benchmarking-gpt-4-against-human-translators","title":"Benchmarking GPT-4 against Human Translators: A Comprehensive Evaluation Across Languages, Domains, and Expertise Levels","arxiv_id":"2411.13775","date":"2024-11-21","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jianhao Yan","Pingchuan Yan","Yulong Chen","Jing Li","Xianchao Zhu","Yue Zhang"],"abstract":"This study presents a comprehensive evaluation of GPT-4's translation capabilities compared to human translators of varying expertise levels. Through systematic human evaluation using the MQM schema, we assess translations across three language pairs (Chinese$\\longleftrightarrow$English, Russian$\\longleftrightarrow$English, and Chinese$\\longleftrightarrow$Hindi) and three domains (News, Technology, and Biomedical). Our findings reveal that GPT-4 achieves performance comparable to junior-level translators in terms of total errors, while still lagging behind senior translators. Unlike traditional Neural Machine Translation systems, which show significant performance degradation in resource-poor language directions, GPT-4 maintains consistent translation quality across all evaluated language pairs. Through qualitative analysis, we identify distinctive patterns in translation approaches: GPT-4 tends toward overly literal translations and exhibits lexical inconsistency, while human translators sometimes over-interpret context and introduce hallucinations. This study represents the first systematic comparison between LLM and human translators across different proficiency levels, providing valuable insights into the current capabilities and limitations of LLM-based translation systems.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.13775v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.13775v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"benchmarking-gpt-4-against-human-translators","repo_url":"https://github.com/elliottyan/gpt_versus_mt_experts","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"benchmarking","task_name":"Benchmarking"},{"task_slug":"machine-translation","task_name":"Machine Translation"},{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"absolute-position-encodings","method_name":"Absolute Position Encodings"},{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"gpt-4","method_name":"GPT-4"},{"method_slug":"label-smoothing","method_name":"Label Smoothing"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"position-wise-feed-forward-layer","method_name":"Position-Wise Feed-Forward Layer"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"transformer","method_name":"Transformer"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2411.13775","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2411.13775"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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