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AI-Powered Translation: How I Used ChatGPT to Translate an Entire Book for an International Audience
One intriguing quote from the book is: “If we don’t change our ways, we’ll become obsolete.” This sentiment captures the pressing need to evolve within the ever-shifting tourism landscape. The industry faces new challenges and opportunities as technology, globalization, and sustainability become increasingly important. As a result, adaptation is no longer an option; it’s a necessity.
Inspired by this call to action, I harnessed ChatGPT to translate my German book, “Tourismus NEXT,” into English. The book comprehensively explores tourism industry experts’ perspectives, featuring over 700 compelling quotes, all written in a “we” style. So naturally, this posed an intriguing challenge for AI. 🤖 Delving into topics like sustainable development, digitalization, and behavioral economics, the book presents a wealth of knowledge that could benefit from AI’s speed and efficiency to bring it to an international audience.
Embarking on the translation with version 3.5 and innovative prompt engineering, the results showed potential but lacked the polish required for publication. Issues included passive voice, excessive “buts,” missing quotation marks, and occasional loss of context. 🤔 As I worked through these issues, I realized that maintaining the essence of the original content and ensuring accuracy was critical to preserving the book’s integrity and message.
To put this into perspective, Grammarly Pro recommended 1,857 revisions for my 140-page manuscript! After addressing these changes, I relied on ChatGPT to refine sentence flow and expand word count. Unfortunately, versions 3.5 and 4.0 underperformed, delivering overly simplistic or verbose suggestions. This experience highlighted the limitations of AI and the importance of human input in achieving a well-rounded, contextually accurate translation.
Persisting, I devoted 50 hours to reworking the book, employing ChatGPT 4.0 to fine-tune specific passages where the phrasing fell short. 💪 Through this process, I gained a deeper understanding of both AI’s capabilities and the challenges it faces in replicating human language and nuance. It also emphasized the potential for AI and human collaboration in content creation and translation…
