Recently, ChatGPT has been gaining more and more attention. We published a blog in May 2023 about its application in medical translation.
ChatGPT and Medical Translation
In this article, we will focus on the prompts (instructions to ChatGPT) for ChatGPT as the second installment.
- Table of Contents
Translate terminology as specified
In medical translation, it is essential to accurately translate specialized terminology. Can it be addressed by properly setting up the ChatGPT prompt?
So, I tried giving instructions as follows using the clinical trial consent/explanation document as a subject.
Translation example:In this clinical trial, we will investigate the safety, tolerability, and clinical efficacy of three investigational drugs, drug A (aaaaaaaaaa), drug B (bbbbbbbbbb), and drug C (cccccccccc), in the treatment of adult patients with advanced liver cancer (hepatocellular carcinoma).
Translation by ChatGPT: This clinical trial aims to evaluate the safety, tolerability, and clinical efficacy of investigational drugs A (aaaaaaaaaa), B (bbbbbbbbbb), and C (cccccccccc) in adult patients with advanced liver cancer (hepatocellular carcinoma).
Note: The name of the medication has been changed to a pseudonym.
Compared to human translation examples, it may be slightly unnatural as a clinical trial consent and explanatory document, but it seems that the translation of terms can be done without any problems. It can be said that specifying the translation of terms is an effective prompt.
Subtitle translation prompt
As mentioned in the following blog, in medical translation, we may translate conference presentations, roundtable discussions, and subtitles for video content.
In subtitle translation, there are constraints on the number of characters, and also, because it is necessary to translate in words that doctors naturally speak, translators often have to boldly summarize the content even if they are usually used to creating accurate translations in a formal style, which can be confusing.
So, I tried to improve the prompt to see if ChatGPT can translate English sentences into subtitle-style translations. Here are the sentences I tried:
Translation Example:Here, we categorize them into three categories for easy understanding: "respiratory diseases", "cancer treatment and prevention", and "chronic inflammatory diseases and genetic diseases", with a total of 55 characters.
The first translation provided by ChatGPT exceeded the character limit (61 characters), and the subsequent translation reduced the character count too much (33 characters).
In the end, in addition to instructions on the number of characters, we were able to obtain the following translation by adding a translation for "to keep things simple" and pointing out errors in "teniwoha".
Translation by ChatGPT: For simplicity, we have classified diseases such as lung diseases, cancer treatment and prevention, chronic inflammation, and genetic diseases. (41 characters)
Is it still more natural to have a human translation example? Also, there are instances where "into three" is missing from the translation. For now, it might be possible to use ChatGPT for translation and use that as a starting point to create the actual translation.
In any case, it seems necessary to consider prompts in advance or try various things in order to approach a translation level close to that of a human translation example.
There are also "tips" for prompts
It seems that there are tips on how to display prompts like this.
In this example, I felt that instructions such as character limits and writing in spoken language are easier to understand when they are formatted as bullet points with line breaks.
However, in my tests, there were many occasions where the prompt for character limit could not be handled properly even with the following text, which is different from the one mentioned above (I managed to handle it by repeatedly instructing without giving up...).
Also, if the instruction is "in spoken language", there may be translations that are too casual, such as "so" or "what the...". It seems like a good idea to make a slight adjustment and say "in the language used by a speaker in a lecture" or "in the language used by a doctor".
The translation is a bit off topic, but there are websites that teach prompt creation methods for bloggers and YouTubers, and there is a trend called "prompt engineering" that optimizes instructions to produce desirable results with AI. If you are interested, why not look it up?
Summary
Dear clients in the medical field, as well as medical translators and translation checkers, the prompt of ChatGPT can be an interesting topic.
The output character count for a single question in ChatGPT seems to be increasing over time, but in practical terms, it will be used in units of no more than 3-4 paragraphs. It can be used to specify terminology translations or to try to achieve a translation suitable for the purpose.
Therefore, I think it would be considered as supplementary use when dealing with a large amount of medical content.
We offer manual translation services, post-editing services, and MTrans for Office, an automatic translation software with ChatGPT integration. If you have any concerns or interests, please feel free to contact us.
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In addition, we also provide information on medical/medical translation as follows. We hope you find it useful.
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