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
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.
Yeah I mean you can translate it literally, but it means nothing. The English equivalent of what it communicates in German would be more like “I hope this email gets delivered to you.” which is just a weird thing to say.
Wouldn’t you just write “ich hoffe Ihnen geht es gut” If you wanted to express concern about the other person’s well-being?
Yeah, but even that is stretching it for a work email unless there is a concrete reason you’d be concerned, like you know they’re dealing with stuff. Otherwise – at least in my northern German circles – that’s already getting pretty personal
