Buoyed by its now global brand recognition, OpenAI’s ChatGPT continues to gain traction as a valid choice for the machine translation (MT) use case.
The latest example is offered by the Albanian government, which will use ChatGPT to translate EU legal measures into Albanian (or shqip) as reported by Euractive on December 13, 2023.
According to the news article, the Albanian government has made an agreement with OpenAI, whose CTO (and brief interim CEO), Mira Murati, hails from Albania.
The goal of the translation is to speed up the process of accession to the European Union. The initial application for EU membership was submitted in 2009, and Albania has been an EU candidate country since 2014.
Albania’s prime minister since 2013, Edi Rama, wants to use the large language model (LLM) to translate official documentation into Albanian and “provide a detailed overview of what and where changes need to be made to local legislation to align with EU rules,” states the article.
Rama is also quoted as saying that the approach would eliminate “an army of translators and a battalion of lawyers, costing millions of euros.” The government is also counting on shortening the time it takes to prepare for final accession approval.
Beyond Murati’s personal ties to Albania, the choice of ChatGPT for raw machine translation may also be driven by the lack of Albanian coverage by the EU’s own eTranslation tool.
That being said, there are, of course, a number of other specialized machine translation offerings that offer Albanian such as Microsoft Translator or Google Translate. And Europe’s thriving cohort of custom machine translation providers wouldn’t turn down a call from Rama either.
