The story goes like this: Good Morning Italia creates daily briefings of the news across sources and interests. One of their clients, a hotel manager, came to them one day and said “This is great, but could you provide a print out version of the briefing for my hotel guests and can I also have it translated into four different languages?” And Good Morning Italia said, “sure, that’s a great idea. But first, we need to consult Activate Intelligence.”
And so they did. Good Morning Italia came to us and asked us to create Spritz agent that would help them provide a printable version of the briefing in four different languages that could be sent to hotels every morning. And we said, “yes, we can do that.”
The first thing about a printed news briefing is that hyperlinks are rendered useless. So the prompt needs to take them out. That’s easy enough. It’s also relatively simple to translate a piece of text in Italian into English, French and German. The translation won’t necessarily be great, but it is simple.
How do we make the translation great?
We use Iteration Prompting. We ask the agent to translate the piece, give itself feedback on how to improve the translation, and then re-write in the required language having taken that feedback into account.
An interesting case study for this happened recently. The prompt was faced with the challenge of an acronym for a department in the Italian government. In Italian, the heading of the article was a bit of word play. The Def (Economic and Financial Document to you and I) had been merged into the word “def-initivo” and was then discussed without referencing what “def” actually stood for. Without being prompted to explain acronyms to a non-Italian audience, the iterative prompt provided a translation in all 3 languages with both a repetition of the word play (where it made sense) and an explanation as to what the acronym stood for.
This is the original text:
Def-initivo L'Aula della Camera ha approvato la risoluzione di maggioranza sul Def con 197 voti a favore, 126 voti contrari e 3 astenuti. È arrivato poi il via libera del Senato con 96 voti a favore, 66 no e 2 astenuti.Our prompt:
Translate the following paragraph from Italian to English, do not alter the structure from the original format.
The rules to follow to write the final translation are;
(long list of style guidelines)
After completing the initial translation, review the quality based on these instructions and suggest improvements.
Using the advice provided, create a final version of the translation
The output from GPT4:
Initial Translation: Definitive The Chamber has passed the majority's resolution on the Def with 197 votes in favor, 126 against, and 3 abstentions. This was followed by approval from the Senate with 96 votes in favor, 66 against, and 2 abstentions.
Review: The translation accurately reflects the content and maintains the HTML structure. However, the term 'Def' might require an explanation for an English-speaking audience unfamiliar with the Italian abbreviation. Also, 'Chamber' could be specified as 'Chamber of Deputies' for clarity.
Final Translation: Definitive The Chamber of Deputies has passed the majority's resolution on the Economic and Financial Document (Def) with 197 votes in favor, 126 against, and 3 abstentions. The Senate subsequently granted approval with 96 votes in favor, 66 against, and 2 abstentions.The thing is, when we tried to repeat this process for the same example it was hard to measure its consistency. Sometimes it did it, sometimes it didn’t. However, it’s still interesting that the iteration prompt helped it to explain acronyms to the non-Italian audience at least a few times. It gave itself feedback to be more clear on untranslatable words, eg. acronyms, in its translation.
So now hotels can get a briefing every morning from Good Morning Italia hot off the press, or out of the printer, for their German, French and English speaking guests as well as their Italian ones. And as we learn more about how our Iteration Prompting works best, they’re going to get an even better translation that takes only a matter of seconds.
We don’t just hand over the translations to the hotels and leave them to faff around on Word at 6 AM every day, something I’m sure no one would be grateful for. Instead, we have another agent that takes the translations and puts them into a nice layout in a PDF in the style of a traditional broadsheet. This includes each hotel’s logos, branding, fonts etc so every briefing is personalised.
Everything is ready to go by the time the PDF is sent. The two agents have done all the hard work: translate the articles from Italian and insert into a beautiful layout. Challenge completed.
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