Overview

Below you will find some examples of prompts that you can use in Smartcat as AI Actions or as custom MT engines. But before we dive into examples, here’s a brief overview of these modes:

• AI Actions are available right inside Smartcat editor, and give you an ability to apply transformations to selected segments. You can select one or more segments, run an AI action, and it will replace translations in these segments with a new value.
• MT engine presets allow you to create custom MT engines that you can use to automatically translate all documents in your projects.

Both AI Actions and and MT engine presets are configured in Workspace settings → MT engine presets.

Which model to use — gpt-4 or gpt-3.5-turbo?

In most cases of AI actions, you might prefer to specify gpt-4 as a model, since it is more advanced and follows prompts more strictly. However, GPT-4 is several times slower than GPT-3.5-turbo, so in certain cases where you want to use GPT as an MT engine to translate large volumes of text, you may want to experiment with gpt-3.5-turbo model.

Custom MT engines

You can create any number of custom MT engines based on OpenAI GPT by setting up MT engine presets. After you save a preset, it will appear in the list of available MT engines in the project settings.

Assume you have created a preset named ‘GPT-4’. To select it as a preferred MT engine in a particular project, go to project → Linguistic assets tab → Machine translation section → enable ‘[x] Use machine translation’ → click the cogwheel button → drag target languages onto the ‘GPT-4’ section as depicted in the screenshots below.

Generic translation preset

This is a generic prompt that will allow you to use OpenAI GPT as a machine translation engine.

1. Model: gpt-4

2. System prompt:

   <aside> <img src="/icons/flash_purple.svg" alt="/icons/flash_purple.svg" width="40px" /> You are a translator from {SOURCE_LANGUAGE} to {TARGET_LANGUAGE}. Your entire response must be a translation, without any explanations.

   </aside>

3. User prompt:

   <aside> <img src="/icons/flash_purple.svg" alt="/icons/flash_purple.svg" width="40px" /> {SOURCE_TEXT}

   </aside>

Specialized translation engine

You can provide additional prompt to make OpenAI GPT use more specific terminology. For example:

1. Model: gpt-4