[gwoolhurme]

I am also multilingual as well and I've tested it personally. English <-> Portuguese does really well, but Portuguese <-> Japanese or even Japanese <-> English is not as good as a human translator by a long shot because of a lot of hidden subtext in conversation. Even something that a university student would probably pickup on in their first year of Japanese as a foreign language. It is still much better than GPT-3.5, so much so that it made a lot of waves here in Japan, but a few friends who work in translation of books and manga find it is not really a go-to tool yet (yet...).

[famouswaffles]

Oh for sure i don't mean to say it's excellent in every language. But i personally think a lot of that is training data representation. Doesn't need to be anywhere equal but for instance after English(93%), the biggest language representation for GPT-3's training corpus is french at...1.8 % Pretty wild.

Of Course i don't know the data for GPT-4

[gwoolhurme]

I am sure it will improve even further as you pointed out the languages outside of English are fairly low in data represented. However, I guess you said you speak Chinese correct? How well does it do with certain things like older poetic Chinese hanzi? In Japanese if there is a string of kanji it tends to mess up the context. Another area of Japanese it seems poorest at is keigo or polite business Japanese. The way you speak to a superior is almost a different language. So I unfortunately still can't use GPT-4 to help me with business emails (yet).

[famouswaffles]

I didn't try with old poetic stuff. Passages sampled from 5 books released in the last 2 decades. You can see what I did thoroughly here. Before GPT-4. Basically a comparison between GLM-130b (English/Chinese model) vs Deepl, Google chatGPT(3.5) etc https://github.com/ogkalu2/Human-parity-on-machine-translati...

Mandarin isn't the second language I speak but I officially compared with it because I wanted to test also with a model that had more equivalent corpus training than the very lopsided gpt models. And Chinese/English is the only combo that has a model of note in that regard.