The recently released ChatGPT has demonstrated surprising abilities in
natural language understanding and natural language generation. Machine
translation is an important and extensively studied task in the field of
natural language processing, which heavily relies on the abilities of language
understanding and generation. Thus, in this paper, we explore how to assist
machine translation with ChatGPT. We adopt several translation prompts on a
wide range of translations. Our experimental results show that ChatGPT with
designed translation prompts can achieve comparable or better performance over
professional translation systems for high-resource language translations but
lags behind significantly on low-resource translations. We further evaluate the
translation quality using multiple references, and ChatGPT achieves superior
performance compared to the professional systems. We also conduct experiments
on domain-specific translations, the final results show that ChatGPT is able to
comprehend the provided domain keyword and adjust accordingly to output proper
translations. At last, we perform few-shot prompts that show consistent
improvement across different base prompts. Our work provides empirical evidence
that ChatGPT still has great potential in translations