A Comparative Study on the Quality of English-Chinese Translation of Legal Texts Between ChatGPT and Neural Machine Translation Systems

This study conducts a comparative analysis of the quality of English-to-Chinese (E-C) and Chinese-to-English (C-E) translation of legal texts between Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) and four online Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems. The analysis includes both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. The results suggest that both ChatGPT and the NMT systems achieve satisfactory performance in translating legal texts from Chinese to English. Although the quality of ChatGPT’s C-E legal translation is slightly lower than that of the NMT systems, the difference is not statistically significant. However, neither ChatGPT nor the NMT systems meet a passing standard for E-C translation of legal texts, with the NMT systems showing better overall performance. Overall, ChatGPT and the NMT systems perform better at translating legal texts from Chinese to English compared to E-C translation. For E-C legal translation, ChatGPT’s quality is lower compared to the NMT systems. While the types of errors are similar in both systems, ChatGPT tends to exhibit more errors, some of which are more severe. This study serves as a reference for those choosing translation tools for E-C and C-E legal texts.