Present Perfect Italian

I don’t speak a word of Italian, but I can write it perfectly.

Well, I can write a prompt that writes perfect Italian. I understand how to instruct something to output in a language that I don’t know and feel confident that it will be written well. It turns out that French A Level has come in handy…

Don’t worry, I’m not just patting myself on the back without checking any of this is true. It has been confirmed by, you know, real Italians.

What this really comes down to is what prompting is, or what it requires.

Ok let’s go back to the start. I am a writer. I’ve been writing since I was 13. Then I went to uni and I studied English Literature. So I really love language and I’d like to think I might be “good” at it. I keep joking that never in my life did I imagine I’d become a woman in STEM. But here we are.

The thing is, prompting is about communicating as clearly as you possibly can. It is about understanding how to manipulate language at one end, to get the desired result at the other. It’s fun! I like the challenge. I like going back to work out why something didn’t work.

In the case of outputting in Italian and writing the prompt in English, it’s about understanding the nuance of the languages even when you don’t speak both of them. It’s not just about translation either. I’m not always translating English into Italian, most of the time I am generating original content in Italian, written by the model. That includes getting the style right too – not just the words, but the voice. I need the prompt to write as if it’s an Italian political analyst, or a French public relations expert, or a Spanish book publisher. The output has to sound right for who it’s meant to be coming from.

There was an issue with one of our Italian language prompts. What it was outputting was grammatically incorrect. It’s because I had written that the prompt “must always use the past tense” which would make sense in English but in Italian, that instruction didn’t pass the mark. Instead it needed the present perfect. The change to the prompt was tiny, but the effect on the output was perceptible.

I needed help with this, naturally. I wasn’t able to tell that the output was writing in an incorrect historical past. But I understood it straight away. That French A Level kicking in, like I said.

All this to say that I am not a programmer, I do not know any programming languages, but I am (if I can say this myself) a good prompter. Prompt writer. Engineer. Artist… I can contribute to the building of agents with a different set of skills and a different background. I can design and imagine, and then write it all down and start to iterate in the English language to get to the output I want. Even when the output I want is in a language I don’t speak. That’s pretty cool, right?