Translating poetry with artificial intelligence: Analyzing ChatGPT's translations through Dryden’s methods

Artificial intelligence has shown its impact on several fields of human life, including professions, thanks to recent technological advancements. For this reason, it has been a research topic in various disciplines. Translation studies is no exception. The use of artificial intelligence in translation and the comparison between human and artificial translation are widely studied topics in the field. However, most existing studies rely on a method based on translation of the text directly without any instruction on translation. To address this gap in the field, this study aims to analyze the performance of ChatGPT in translation when instructed to translate based on specific translation methods. A happy lip—breaks sudden by Emily Dickinson was selected as the sample for this study. In alignment with the study’s aim, John Dryden’s translation methods- metaphrase, paraphrase and imitation- were selected. The poem was first translated by a human translator from English into Turkish. Then ChatGPT was given the prompt "Translate the following poem by Emily Dickinson into Turkish, applying the three translation methods described by John Dryden: metaphrase, paraphrase, and imitation”. The results revealed that ChatGPT could adapt to the characteristics of the Paraphrase method more than Metaphrase and Imitation.