I am getting tired of reading translated novel from people who use machine translate where the naming is so inconsistent. For example, 班长 have so many form such as "Class Monitor", "Squad Leader", "Captain", "Commander"... Translation should use 1 and stick to it! Not randomly pick one for every time the word show up. It get really confusing and I can tell this is from machine translate. I know because I use ChatGPT (free edition) to translation novel for my personal enjoyment. This problem doesn't happen with human translation. If you are translating by hand, please continue to do so! ChatGPT is good for assistance but should not replace translation!. But if you are completely relying on ChatGPT, then please continue reading. In ChatGPT there is something call "Customize ChatGPT". You can take advantage of it by inserting your own custom instruction. The custom instruction help you to reduce ALOT of editing work and make the novel much higher quality. Sentences read much smoother too. Sometime this make you feel as if a human translated instead of machine. Often time, with the custom instruction, you don't even need editing! Custom instruction doesn't fix 100% of the time but most of the time. Your custom instruction will grow as you translate. Note that you are limited by 1500 letter in the instruction. Below is an example of a custom instructions I used. The below instruction fix the following: - Pronouns (he/she) - 沈冰 will be known as "Shen Bing". Otherwise you would see "Shen Icy" or "Shen Ice" randomly - 班长 will be "Class Monitor". Otherwise you would see "Squad Leader", "Captain", "Commander" randomly Example instruction: Code: Translate passage from Chinese novel to English. Use the following male name in translation: "陆哲"-"Lu Zhe" "刘能"-"Liuneng" "永强"-"Yongqiang" "陆哲哥"-"Brother Lu Zhe" Use the following female name in translation: "江瑶"-"Jiang Yao" "瑶瑶"-"Yao Yao" "浅浅"-"Qian Qian" "果儿"-"Guo'er" "宁舒"-"Ning Shu" "沈冰"-"Shen Bing" "冰姐"-"Sister Bing" "海燕"-"Haiyan" "林浅浅"-"Lin Qian Qian" "唐小果"-"Tang Xiaoguo" Use the following in translation: "相公"-"Husband" "班长"-"Class Monitor" "爱妃"-"Beloved Consort"
ChatGPT is nice to proofread some phrases or translate shorter phrases, but most of time I feel the quality lacks... Plus it cannot translate anything NSFW - even kisses are seen as nsfw it seems
Honestly, I just find GPT3.5 to be crap. After a friend let me try out his GPT4 to assist me in prepping for exams, the difference is night and day. It's super expensive and not worth it for me however.
Interesting strategy for custom instructions. I use Anthropic Claude, might preface my prompts with something like this.
Can it translate a short human name? For example, a female character named "苏". Apparently, "苏" is a common word in Chinese, if you tell ChatGpt that "苏" is a female named "Su", can it identify and differentiate it from other "苏"?
DeepL has a glossary that you can set to remember specific translations like names, and the there are options to swap out translations if needed. I find it’s more literal and doesn't do as well compared to chatGPT in coherency, but at that point i just bounce back and forth between sentences and use the one that’s better.
All the consumer-facing Gen AI chat clients like ChatGPT and Gemini have pretty strict safety filters. If you don't mind dabbling in a bit of code, the developer APIs allow you to turn off these filters. I've been using the free Gemini API and its been working quite well to translate entire chapters.
This is a great tip! It’s why we built the ability to automatically generate, or input your own translation glossary so everything stays consistent across your entire story.