Evaluating ChatGPT's Performance in Persian-to-English Proverb Translation: The Role of Contextual Information and Prompt Design
Abstract
Previous research has documented the challenges translators face when working with idiomatic expressions, particularly proverbs, due to their cultural specificity and linguistic complexity. This study explores the efficacy of integrating AI into the translation process, with a focus on translating Persian proverbs into English. To investigate this, 100 Persian proverbs were selected from Moosavi’s (2000) book and supplemented with contextual information from the Daneshchi website, https://www.daneshchi.ir/category/zarbolmasal-irani/, accessed July 2025, to ensure a comprehensive understanding of each proverb’s meaning/usage. The Persian proverbs, their figurative meanings, and contextual explanations were provided individually to ChatGPT-4o to generate English translations. These English translations generated by AI were compared with reliable dictionaries for verification of accuracy. The comparison showed that out of 100 proverbs, 70 had accurate English equivalents, 21 had incorrect equivalents, and 9 were paraphrased based on the provided context. These findings suggest that ChatGPT-4o can be a useful tool in translating Persian proverbs when provided with sufficient contextual information, though human oversight remains necessary given the 30% error rate. The study implies that AI-based translation tools, when contextually guided, can support human translators in dealing with culturally bound expressions. However, the need for human translators to critically review and validate AI-generated outputs is still essential.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Hamideh Nemati Lafmejani, Seyed Mehdi Mousavian
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Copyright Licensee: Iranian Journal of Translation Studies. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0 license).
