this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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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 โ at least in my northern German circles โ that's already getting pretty personal
Yeah, as a fellow northern German I would never write that either. Maybe on a greeting card.
Doubt it. It was probably trained the most on English, and as a result, it applies English characteristics to other languages
There's a lot more English-language data to start with, so it's inevitable they did this or else just trained it primarily in English.