The recently released ChatGPT has demonstrated surprising abilities in natural language understanding and natural language generation. Machine translation is an important and extensively studied task in the field of natural language processing, which heavily relies 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 professional translation systems for high-resource language translations but lags behind significantly on low-resource translations. We further evaluate the translation quality using multiple references, and ChatGPT achieves superior performance compared to the professional 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在自然语言理解与生成方面展现出惊人的能力。机器翻译作为自然语言处理领域一项重要且被广泛研究的任务，高度依赖语言理解与生成能力。为此，本文探索如何利用ChatGPT辅助机器翻译。我们采用多种翻译提示策略，对大量翻译任务进行实验。实验结果表明，对于高资源语言翻译，采用精心设计的翻译提示的ChatGPT能够达到甚至超越专业翻译系统的性能，但在低资源语言翻译上显著落后。我们进一步使用多个参考译文评估翻译质量，发现ChatGPT的表现优于专业系统。在领域特定翻译实验中，最终结果显示ChatGPT能够理解提供的领域关键词并相应调整，输出恰当的译文。最后，我们通过少样本提示实验发现，不同基础提示下均能获得一致的性能提升。本研究为ChatGPT在翻译领域仍具巨大潜力提供了实证依据。