Optimising ChatGPT for creativity in literary translation: A case study from English into Dutch, Chinese, Catalan and Spanish

Shuxiang Du, Ana Guerberof Arenas, Antonio Toral, Kyo Gerrits, Josep Marco Borillo
4/25/2025
cs.CL

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Abstract

This study examines the variability of Chat-GPT machine translation (MT) outputs across six different configurations in four languages,with a focus on creativity in a literary text. We evaluate GPT translations in different text granularity levels, temperature settings and prompting strategies with a Creativity Score formula. We found that prompting ChatGPT with a minimal instruction yields the best creative translations, with "Translate the following text into [TG] creatively" at the temperature of 1.0 outperforming other configurations and DeepL in Spanish, Dutch, and Chinese. Nonetheless, ChatGPT consistently underperforms compared to human translation (HT).

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Cite this paper

@article{du2025optimising,
  title  = {Optimising ChatGPT for creativity in literary translation: A case study from English into Dutch, Chinese, Catalan and Spanish},
  author = {Shuxiang Du and Ana Guerberof Arenas and Antonio Toral and Kyo Gerrits and Josep Marco Borillo},
  year   = {2025},
  eprint = {2504.18221},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url    = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18221v1}
}

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