Translating Japanese to English

I currently work for Sony and that means I interact with a lot of Japanese people as well as documents written in Japanese. One of my coworkers moved from Tokyo to Los Angeles to help with her English skills. Unfortunately she still lacks a bit of confidence. Sometimes she will start with a document in Japanese and then use a translation program like Google Translate to convert it to English. Today I found myself needing to review several of her documents even though they had not been translated.

At Sony we need to be careful as to what translation services we use. While it is probably not a problem to use Google Translate, some of our documents contain company secrets and so we have set up our own large language model (LLM) artificial intelligence (AI) service to help with translation. This keeps outside services from being able to review our documents and being able to deduce some of the projects we are undertaking.

Our private LLM is based off similar technology to ChatGPT and so some of the things I have tried will work on that publicly available service.

I logged into our LLM and selected what type of help I wanted. Some of my choices included General, Image, and Document as well as Translator. Naturally I selected the last one and it presented a dialog area where I could ask questions and it would provide a response. I started with, "Translate the following from Japanese to English:," and then copied and pasted a Japanese phrase from the document I needed to review. Before spitting out an answer, the LLM asked me to provide some context such as the intended audience. I mentioned it will be used for internal documentation and then it provided a translation. The English matched my expectation of what should be in the document and so I copied the text into the original document under the Japanese text.

Next I typed, "Translate:," followed by another Japanese phrase and the LLM replied with, "Certainly, here is the translation." It was so polite I wanted to start all of my requests with, "Please." I stopped myself from using such pleasantries knowing that the machine doing the work would ignore them. I also tried just copying and pasting the Japanese text without indicating I wanted it translated. Most of the time, the LLM would translate for me. Several times it responded with something along the lines of, "I'm sorry I don't know what to do." Simply prepending the phrase with, "Translate," would be all the instructions it needed.

I translated three or four documents rather quickly and could review them. The translations seemed clear and concise. I shared what I had done with my colleague and she is happy I took the initiative to get something done instead of waiting for her. She can now review the work done by the LLM and make sure it matches her initial intent.

My experience with Large Language Model AI impressed me today. I prefer to write my own documentation and so there are not a lot of other uses for the technology. It did do an amazing job translating a very difficult language like Japanese to English and is now my favorite technology for such jobs in the future. Should you need translation services, I highly recommend giving it a try.