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.

翻译：近期发布的ChatGPT在自然语言理解与自然语言生成方面展现出惊人能力。机器翻译高度依赖语言理解与生成能力，本文据此探索如何利用ChatGPT辅助机器翻译。我们采用多种翻译提示语，在广泛翻译任务上进行了实验。结果表明：针对高资源语言翻译，使用设计提示语的ChatGPT能达到甚至超越商业翻译系统的性能。进一步通过多参考译文评估翻译质量，ChatGPT较商业系统表现更优。我们在领域特定翻译上的实验显示，ChatGPT能够理解所提供的领域关键词并相应调整输出合适的译文。最后，采用少样本提示语在不同基础提示语下均展现出一致性改进。本研究从实证角度证明，ChatGPT在翻译领域仍具有巨大潜力。