this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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One of those things I remember reading was the ability of ChatGPT to translate texts. It was trained with texts in multiple languages, but never translation specifically. Still, it’s quite good at it.
That is just its core function doing its thing transforming inputs to outputs based on learned pattern matching.
It may not have been trained on translation explicitly, but it very much has been trained on these are matching stuff via its training material. Since you know what its training set most likely contained..... dictionaries. Which is as good as asking it to learn translation. Another stuff most likely in training data: language course books, with matching translated sentences in them. Again well you didnt explicitly tell it to learn to translate, but in practice the training data selection did it for you.
The data is there, but simpler models just couldn’t do it, even when trained with that data.
Bilingual human children also often can’t translate between their two (or more) native languages until they get older.
That's interesting. My trilingual kids definitely translate individual words, but I guess the real bar here is to translate sentences such that the structure is correct for the languages?
A lot of the training set was probably Wiktionary and Wikipedia which includes translations, grammar, syntax, semantics, cognates, etc.