I have a theory that it should have a very different “personality” (probably more like writing style) depending on language because it’s an entirely different set of training data
In English chatGPT is rather academic and has a recognisable style of writing, if you’ve used it a bit you can usually get hints something was written by it just by reading it.
Does it speak in a similar tone, with similar mannerisms in other languages? (where possible, obviously some things don’t translate)
I don’t know a second language well enough to have natural conversation so I’m unable to test this myself, and may have worded things awkwardly from a lack of understanding
It behaves in the same way in Italian
If you ask ChatGPT to communicate to you in a different writing style it can do a decent job of doing so. It will also respect requests to decrease verbosity and formality. The default writing style is some kind of specific configuration they have made for it, it’s not a fundamental characteristic of it.
This makes me wonder if they’ve written that configuration for every language though, or if the English instructions work on other languages
I wonder if you could tell it to write like Shakespeare or something in English, then have a chat with it in Spanish and have that persist
My guess would be that it wouldn’t transfer, otherwise it’d need to have some understanding of the words beyond just language
I think the misunderstanding here is in thinking ChatGPT has “languages”. It doesn’t choose a language. It is always drawing from everything it knows. The ‘configuration’ hence is the same for all languages, it’s just basically an invisible prompt telling it, in plain text, how to communicate.
When you change/add your personalized “Custom Instructions”, this is basically the same thing.
I would assume that this invisible context is in English, no matter what. It should make no difference.
I struggle to grasp how that could work though
It’s basically just predicting what word should come next, based on many many many examples, but in very few of these examples would a conversation be across multiple languages
Sure it’s drawing from all of its training at all times, but that training would inherently be separated
The general explanation at least afaik is that preprompts work because it can predict what instructions would normally prompt people to respond with but there would be few or no examples to draw on of a message being sent in one language and acted on in another
In two languages I’m learning, German and Chinese, I’ve found it to suffer from “translationese”. It’s grammatically correct, but the sentence structure and word choice feel like the answer was first written in English then translated.
No single sentence is wrong, but overall it sounds unnatural and has none of the “flavor” of the language. That also makes it bad for learning - it avoids a lot of sentence patterns you’ll see/hear in day to day life.
Curious, maybe it was trained using existing translation tech rather than being trained on actual examples of the language like it was for English?
As a native German speaker I agree that ChatGPT is very English-flavored. I think it’s just because the sheer amount of English training data is so much larger that the patterns it learned from that bleed over into other languages. Traditional machine translations are also often pretty obvious in German, but they are more fundamentally wrong in a way that ChatGPT isn’t.
It’s also somewhat cultural. The output you get from ChatGPT often sounds overly verbose and downright ass-kissing in German, even though I know I wouldn’t get that impression from the same output in English, simply because the way you communicate in professional environments is vastly different. (There is no German equivalent to “I hope this email finds you well”, for example.)
“Ich hoffe, diese Nachricht erreicht Sie.” Would work, but I haven’t seen it used too. I also haven’t seen the English version, but that makes sense, as I work for a German company.
No single sentence is wrong, but overall it sounds unnatural and has none of the “flavor” of the language.
I’ve also found that it’s often contextually wrong. Like it doesn’t know what’s going on around it or how to interpret the previous paragraph or even the previous sentence, let alone the sentence two pages back that was actually relevant to the sentence it’s now working on.
Pro tipp: translate with both ChatGPT and Deepl and pick what sounds or reads best.
DeepL prompted a change in career choice for me, honestly. I was initially looking into finding work as a translator, since Cantonese is an in-demand language, but (while it is still not perfect) I have seen massive improvements in translation tech over time, and DeepL was my breaking point that helped me realize “Okay, maybe this can all be automated in the future”.
While plain direct translation might be automated (though not necessarily because some things just don’t translate), localization is a whole different deal. Can’t speak much for Cantonese because I can’t speak it, but as an Arabic speaker I can’t see an AI being able to translate from Arabic to English as well as a human can anytime soon.
Sorry, should have clarified. It does Mandarin, but in terms of technical capabilities, it is demonstrable of the fact that the technology is there.
For context, I am Chinese-American and Cantonese was spoken at home, but I lived for a few years in Fuzhou, China where Mandarin is common (though the older people still speak Fuzhouhua which I didn’t bother to dive into). Occasionally I would have to look something up in Mandarin, though, and it was honestly easier to just use DeepL and translate from English with fairly decent results (and I knew enough to be able to fix the grammar where I noticed it was sometimes off, albeit even my Cantonese reading/writing skills aren’t perfect).
