AI translation is officially everywhere, being both helpful in some situations while also being overused in far too many situations.
While people are using ChatGPT and similar programs for everything nowadays, whether it’s to write emails, blog posts or even entire books, people are getting wise to noticing when a text looks like it has been written by AI – and losing interest in the text as a result. But if you’re a dab hand at writing AI prompts and getting it to rework the text, what’s the problem with using it for translation?

1. AI translation tries to translate every word (and that’s bad)
2. AI translation doesn’t understand what the text is actually saying
3. AI translation does not like to change the sentence structure to improve flow
4. AI translation translates too literally (even when you tell it not to)
5. Conclusion

Professional translators will tell anyone who listens that AI translation (or machine translation, like Google Translate) is still nowhere near as good as a human when it comes to crafting good-quality translations, especially when you need a creative translation or a unique text. This is especially true for the arts sector – just look at how the Les Misérables musical was translated into English and tell me if AI could ever pull off such a feat.

Still, ChatGPT recently rolled out a dedicated translation page, where you can select not only the languages, but also select the tone you would like the translation to take. Is it any good? Let’s put it to the test.

I decided to ask ChatGPT to translate an arts text that I had translated myself recently: a theatre review about a French adaptation of the play The Shape of Things, which ran in Paris in 2024.

I selected ‘translate this and make it sound more fluent’ of the four options available – the others are ‘Translate this and make it more business formal’, ‘translate this as if you’re explaining it to a child’ and ‘translate this for an academic audience’.
Of course, there are many other tones of voice that you might need for a text, and you’d hope that they all sound fluent in their own way.

My initial thoughts of this AI-translated review is that…it wasn’t terrible in places. You can understand most of the text, which is why AI translation tends to work okay for short, generic passages of text.

But when it comes to arts translations or more creative texts – or even longer passages of text – AI translation quickly runs into several pitfalls that it doesn’t know what to do with, resulting in a clunky and unnatural-sounding translation.

Below are a few examples of these pitfalls that a human translator would be aware of, and would quickly and easily be able to overcome without you even having to prompt them.

AI translation tries to translate every word (and that’s bad)

When you tell a computer to translate a text, it will do as you say: for better or for worse. This also means replacing every word for a new one in the new language. But in many cases, that is not the sign of a good translation – for natural-sounding English, translators may have to add or even take away words to get it to flow. Here is a sentence in the theatre review translation that talks about the original English version of the play:

Here, ChatGPT has simply replaced each French word with an English one, which creates quite a clunky sentence in English. The word ‘future’ did not need to be repeated, and the word ‘alternately’ is a little superfluous. ‘The greatest interest’ is also odd. Here’s what I translated it as:

Published in 2022, it belongs to a period where LaBute, both a filmmaker and playwright, was generating a lot of interest in France, with critics hailing him as the next Woody Allen or David Mamet.

We often ‘hail’ people as ‘the next so-and-so’, so this reads a lot more naturally for a theatre review. I also added the word ‘with’ and cut out ‘alternately’ as well as the second ‘future/next’, making it flow nicely without affecting the meaning of the text.

We’ll see examples of me adding more words to the translation to improve readability in the next section too.

AI translation doesn’t understand what the text is actually saying

Arts and cultural texts are more likely to have flowery language, which can be difficult for a computer to translate accurately. As its translation skills are trained on existing online translations, AI struggles when it comes up against truly unique sentences.

Sometimes, a sentence needs to be picked apart to truly understand its meaning before you can translate it. A skilled human translator who is fluent in their working languages can do this quickly, but ChatGPT and the like can only translate the words that are there, and if you don’t speak the language you want it to translate, you may not be able to help it improve its output or know if its alternative suggestions are correct.

This, uh, doesn’t even make sense. In fact, I asked ChatGPT to retranslate the last part so that it flowed better, and it gave me these alternatives, telling me that the first is ‘the most neutral and elegant’ (is it, though?).

Here are a few smoother options, keeping the same critical tone and register. The first is the most neutral and elegant:

Preferred version:
Which is a real shame, because in the way it addresses the value of new approaches to art—at a time when the painterly gesture is giving way to installations and happenings—it easily stands alongside Art.

Slightly more assertive:
Which is a real shame, since its exploration of new ways of engaging with art—at a moment when the painterly gesture is being eclipsed by installations and happenings—more than holds its own against Art.

More concise:
Which is a real shame, because in its treatment of new artistic practices, at a time when painting gives way to installations and happenings, it easily rivals Art.

These still aren’t great, but they might at least help you understand a little more about what the text is actually saying. But it still keeps holding on to this ‘painterly gesture’ phrase that we don’t really need in English – we are just talking about the act of painting (which it finally got in the third example). Plus, it still just keeps “Art” with a capital A, without any extra explanation of what this actually means.

You might have also noticed that ChatGPT tends to default to US English (e.g. ‘favor’) but also used the UK spelling of ‘theatre’. Your preferred language variety is another thing to bear in mind when translating.

Here’s my attempt at this paragraph:

As The Shape of Things was adapted into a film by its author, under the same title in English and as Fausses apparences in French, it’s easy to understand why no-one thought to translate it and put it on stage in France at that time.
And that’s a shame, as it’s certainly worthy of the term “art” when it comes to exploring the merits of modern approaches to art, in an era where traditional painting is dying out in favour of installations and “happenings”.

Hopefully mine gets down to the actual meaning of the sentence with less of the confusion that ChatGPT introduced. While we didn’t need the word ‘geste/gesture’ to get our point across in English, I have added extra words to clarify that we are talking about putting the show on in France. Since we’re talking about the English and French versions of the play, it’s important to specify the country we’re referring to.

AI translation does not like to change the sentence structure to improve flow

Often in translation, to really make the text sound natural, translators may need to chop sentences up into smaller ones, let two run together, or completely reorder the sentence to get it right.

Each language structures sentences in a different ways, so when you stick too closely to the original, it can quickly sound weird in the new language. Here is a very long sentence in this French theatre review:

Once again, ChatGPT has been tripped up by the creative language used here, as ‘overgrown student’ is a mistranslation and makes it sound like the man has morphed into a giant or something.
The rest of the paragraph is quite a long sentence by English standards. It also misses a detail at the end: the two friends mentioned are also a couple (un couple d’amis), and their descriptions are a bit clunky: is ‘the reactionary good-looking guy’ and ‘a dancer in love’ a normal way to describe people?

Here’s mine:

In La forme des choses, the explosive encounter between Adam (Eliot Vincent), a nerdy, awkward museum worker and student, and Evelyne (Mila Michael), a beautiful art student with a slight Argentinian accent, obsessed with completing her art project at all costs and always willing to challenge any forms of censorship, triggers major changes in both their lives. It also affects Adam’s friends, the attractive and conservative Philippe (Louis Haffreingue) and his girlfriend Jeanne, a love-struck dancer (Marie Mathis Aubert).

In my version, I break the sentence up a little, and manage to keep all the information that describes the character while also mentioning that the friends are a couple. This is part of the play’s synopsis, so it needs to be concise and understandable to quickly paint a picture for the reader.

AI translation translates too literally (even when you tell it not to)

Of course, you can ask ChatGPT to redo any part of the text that you don’t like, and ask it to give several alternative translations. I tried that with this paragraph, where it kept getting stuck with the figurative language:

Firstly, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ feels a bit odd here, and the sentences starting with ‘and’ and ‘all the more so’ are a little jarring. Then we have this ‘artificially grafted onto the original’ phrase. What does this mean? I asked for more alternatives and here are some of the suggestions ChatGPT came up with:

Neutral / idiomatic

…never feels forced or imposed.

…never feels forced or contrived.

Slightly more theatrical / critical

…never feels forced or tacked on.

…never feels forced or bolted on.

More elegant / literary

…never feels forced or at odds with the original.

…never feels forced or foreign to the play’s fabric.

Closest to the French “plaquée” in tone

…never feels forced or pasted on.

…never feels forced or artificially layered onto the original.

It’s getting closer with the suggestions of ‘contrived’ and ‘at odds with the original’ but on the whole, it still stuck to this idea of ‘sticking’ something to something else…which is not really what the text means. Here’s what I went with:

La forme des choses is a perfect Anglo-American play, in that its main aim is to entertain, with the subject matter a secondary factor – and it succeeds in this completely. The French translation by Eliot Vincent and Mila Michael feels natural, not cobbled together.

As you can see, I combined two sentences together again, and made the English much less wordy. I hope that my translation feels ‘natural, not cobbled together’ too!

Conclusion

These are only four examples of the many challenges of translating, and especially translating for the arts and culture sector.

Despite its environmental impact, it seems unlikely that AI translation will go away completely. When it comes to creative translation, however, a human can provide so much more value beyond just generating a text into another language.

A professional translator can be mindful of your audience, find original solutions that are less generic, and use their cultural expertise or even sense of humour to craft a natural and compelling translation that you can be proud of. If you need a creative translation for the cultural sector, contact me for a free, no-obligation quote.

About me | My translation services | Contact