Investigating ChatGPT Translation Hallucination from an Embodied-Cognitive Translatology Perspective

Hui Jiao, Xinwei Li, Jonathan Ding, Xiaojun Zhang

Abstract: ChatGPT faces significant challenges in realising the dynamic construction of reality, cognition and language emphasised in Embodied-cognitive translatology. This study first examines the translation application of ChatGPT, defines hallucination phenomena, and reviews related research. It then explores the hallucination phenomena in ChatGPT’s translation tasks, categorizing them into semantic, pragmatic, syntactic, and cultural hallucinations. To quantify these manifestations, we manually annotate ChatGPT’s English-Chinese translations on the Flores-101 dataset, providing statistical insights into the frequency and severity of each type of hallucination. This analysis offers clarity on the prevalence of various hallucinations and suggests directions for improvement. Finally, this study summarises the current research on hallucination mitigation strategies in a targeted way, including the improvement of corpus quality, model architecture development, and prompt engineering techniques, offering novel insights for advancing machine translation technology towards greater intelligence.