How Reliable Are AI Tools for Translating Culinary Recipes?
Some Surprises
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14393/LL63-v42S-2026-9Keywords:
Machine translation, Conventionality, Culinary recipes, Pellegrino ArtusiAbstract
This study compares the performance of neural machine translation tools with that of generative AI in the translation of a 19th-century Italian culinary recipe into Brazilian Portuguese and English. Ever since the development of machine translation tools, translators have feared for the future of their profession. However, research has shown that, for the time being, such tools speed up the translation task but still depend on human post-editing. The evolution of generative AI systems led to the release, in 2018, of the GPT model by OpenAI. Although this and other models were not originally designed for translation, they are now used as an alternative to neural machine translation systems such as Google Translate and DeepL. Based on a comparable corpus of Brazilian culinary language and a general-language corpus, the automatic translations are analyzed with respect to their acceptability in terms of conventionality in the target language. The study also enables a longitudinal analysis of translations carried out in 2022 and 2024.Downloads
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