Papers › How to Design Translation Prompts for ChatGPT: An Empirical Study

How to Design Translation Prompts for ChatGPT: An Empirical Study

5 Apr 2023arXiv:2304.02182archive 2025-07-28

Yuan Gao, Ruili Wang, Feng Hou

The recently released ChatGPT has demonstrated surprising abilities in natural language understanding and natural language generation. Machine translation relies heavily on the abilities of language understanding and generation. Thus, in this paper, we explore how to assist machine translation with ChatGPT. We adopt several translation prompts on a wide range of translations. Our experimental results show that ChatGPT with designed translation prompts can achieve comparable or better performance over commercial translation systems for high-resource language translations. We further evaluate the translation quality using multiple references, and ChatGPT achieves superior performance compared to commercial systems. We also conduct experiments on domain-specific translations, the final results show that ChatGPT is able to comprehend the provided domain keyword and adjust accordingly to output proper translations. At last, we perform few-shot prompts that show consistent improvement across different base prompts. Our work provides empirical evidence that ChatGPT still has great potential in translations.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

andrewyng/translation-agent mentioned on GitHubMIT report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Machine TranslationNatural Language UnderstandingText GenerationTranslation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

BASE

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections