ChatGPT 4o translated my Raku course

How ChatGPT helped me to get hundreds of translations in minutes.

A couple of years ago I published a part of my course of the Raku programming language. It was an English writing, and recently I got a request to add a translation. The person was also generous enough to make a bunch of translations himself, so I had to somehow integrate the translation into the interface.

But I thought that one translation would not be enough, so I decided to try ChatGPT 4o to prepare more translations for me. It was obviously not a task to copy-and-paste all the hundreds of files to the web interface, so a small program using the API did the job.

English (original text)
German
Spanish
Italian
Latvian
Dutch
Bulgarian
Russian (partially translated by a human)
Ukrainian

I got 9 languages in the public access now, and a couple of languages that I did not link online yet (Esperanto and Latin). I chose the languages where I can at least confirm that the translation is adequate, but I can also see that in many many cases the translation is just perfect. It is not possible to see any significant problems even in the translation to my native language.

Altogether, it cost me less than €15 to translate ~300 pages to a dozen languages. This is just amazing. ChatGPT was smart enough to even translate the comments in the program samples, keeping the programming language and markup untouched.

Well, it does not behave 100% stable, and after a while decided to translate all the keys in a YAML file too, but I don’t find that a big problem. The funniest thing it did was translating the program to Latin more than it needed, replacing the keyword say with the Latin dicere.

So all in all, here’re the 9 versions of the initial text. Eight more languages that I managed to gather in just a few days.