GPT translation assistant for Loco Translate

This is an experimental add-on for the Loco Translate WordPress plugin that attempts to use ChatGPT as a machine translation service.

Usage

Briefly...

• Install WordPress and Loco Translate.
• Install this plugin via Git, or by downloading the source.
• Define OPENAI_API_KEY somewhere useful, like your WordPress config.
• Try it out from the Loco Translate editor.

For more detailed instructions, see how to install our IBM Translation API plugin.

About

While it's evident that ChatGPT is very capable of doing translation, OpenAI don't provide a dedicated translation API in the same sense as (for example) DeepL or Google Translate. Interacting with the chat assistant is more like a conversation whereby natural language is sent and received.

Translating a bunch of arbitrary strings makes a chat API a strange fit. I want to send a JSON array of source strings and get a corresponding JSON array back. Fortunately ChatGPT can speak JSON. But does it want to?

The approach used is this...

First the assistant is prompted as follows:

You are a helpful assistant that translates English to French and replies with well formed JSON arrays only.

Then the source strings are encoded into a JSON array and appended to a prompt, like so:

Translate the following JSON array from English to a JSON array in French even if the values are the same:
["Foo","Bar","Baz"]

This seems to avoid unpredicatable natural language answers that are unparsable. ChatGPT may be clever, but my code is not. It seems to oblige and reply with a corresponding array of translations, but your mileage may vary. Feedback welcome.

Notes

• If you're a free OpenAI user you'll probably experience very slow API responses during busy times.

• Older GPT 3 models don't work with this plugin. I tried models like text-davinci-003 but could not get it to behave via the older completions API. See Chat vs Completions.

• Loco is not affiliated with OpenAI.