When minds meet machines: A pilot programme of using Chat-GPT to teach political speech translation in a Chinese-to-English translation classroom

This piece of reflection draws on a pilot programme of using Chat-GPT in the teaching of political speech translation in a Chinese-to-English translation classroom. The conduction of this pilot was driven by, among others, a growing concern by the third-year undergraduates doing Chinese-English translation as their major; they have aired worries that human translators might be replaced by large language models capable of doing the translation. The students observed and compared the human translation (by institutional interpreters) and the Chat-GPT translation of four political speeches delivered by Chinese government officials at the General Debate of the United Nations General Assembly. While acknowledging some strengths of Chat-GPT, they found that the GPT translation stayed too ‘close’ to the source text Chinese, potentially leading to issues at the lexical, sentence, and contextual levels. The author (also the course convenor) then reflected on the strengths and limitations of Chat-GPT in conjunction with pedagogical considerations regarding the ethical and practical implications of GPT-enabled machine translation. The paper concludes that GPT is not, and will not be, an adequate substitute for the language expertise, cultural awareness, ideological sensitivity, and creative abilities to ‘re-write’ on the part of professional human translators.