The ATA Chronicle - November/December 2023 - 27

BP
market that can strip Oxford
commas out of text in a
single pass. (See Figure 4 on
page 26.)
But before you
panic, remember
that it's still the
early days.
These systems
are new to
everyone-even
AI developers
don't know
everything they
can do.
CAVEATS
y The first time I entered
the prompt, ChatGPT took
out the Oxford comma
but didn't change the
spelling. The second time, I
capitalized the word AND to
draw attention to the second
part of my request, and that
seems to have helped.
y ChatGPT will often provide
a blurb at the end of a
response telling you what
it did and why. In this case,
it told me that Canadian
English generally uses
the Oxford comma, which
is an overreach and a
generalization. (ChatGPT can
be a bit of a know-it-all.)
Fixing Word Choice: The
second, even more exciting,
aspect of this functionality
is changing word choice in a
single step. (See Figure 5.)
Whoa. You would not
be able to do this cleanly
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using search and replace in
Word, especially given the
different suffixes and the
fact that " observe " ends in
an " e " and " watch " doesn't.
This is where the multilayer
language capabilities of
ChatGPT really shine.
5 Formatting
FIGURE 5 Using ChatGPT to change word choice
in a single step
PDF Source Files:
FIGURE 6 Using ChatGPT to fix formatting
Although PDF source files
have become less common,
they still land in our inboxes
from time to time, especially
in the form of government
and official documents
(again, consider any privacy
concerns before pasting text
into ChatGPT). They tend
to be straightforward and
repetitive, so it's usually in
your best interests to get
them into a format where
you can use CAT and MT
tools. You can use a robust
optical character recognition
(OCR) solution like ABBYY
FineReader (which is,
incidentally, AI-driven)
to convert the PDF to an
editable Word document. But
when the source language
has accents or complex
characters, certain sections
get blown out. Figure 6
shows you what ChatGPT
can do to help you prep
these problematic files
for translation.
Some of the more obvious
issues that ChatGPT fixed in
Figure 6 are underlined in
red in the prompt and in the
response. It had no problem
identifying the language,
fixing the blown-out accent
marks, and making sense of
the gibberish.
CAVEAT
y The first time I entered
the prompt, ChatGPT also
American Translators Association 27
ChatGPT's appeal is in
what it can do for translators
beyond translation.
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The ATA Chronicle - November/December 2023

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