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AI-translated poetry: Ivan Franko’s poems in GPT-3.5-driven machine and human-produced translations

Viacheslav Karaban, Anna Karaban

Article ID: 1994
Vol 6, Issue 1, 2024, Article identifier:

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Abstract

The article presents a detailed comparative analysis of translations of twelve great Ukrainian poet Ivan Franko’s poems done by translator Percival Cundy and the GPT-3.5 AI language model. Using various manual and automatic analytical research methods and techniques, we analyzed the translations’ merits, demerits, and eight essential qualitative and quantitative linguistic and poetic characteristics to verify a hypothesis that human and GPT-3.5-driven machine translations can be quite comparable in terms of their quality and poetic features. The results obtained sufficiently prove the hypothesis and suggest that developing AI translation potential for poetry translation can help build more capable, diversified, and nuanced large language models. The AI revolutionary breakthrough in translation makes it quite possible to acquaint satisfactorily the wider public with the poetic heritage of the world’s nations, especially those using minor languages, whose poetry is evidently under-translated. A follow-up study is desirable to assess the progress made by GPT4.0 and its possible later versions in poetry translation, as compared with GPT-3.5.


Keywords

AI translation; Ivan Franco’s poems, human translation; comparative analysis; poetry translation; translation from Ukrainian into English

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.59400/fls.v6i1.1994
(307 Abstract Views, 229 PDF Downloads)

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