Translation within Excel
Whether you are translating product catalogs, website copy, UI text, or any other content, GPT for Excel helps you remove ambiguity and tailor translations to your needs by defining detailed guidelines. This guide walks you through translating a list of product names for a shoe store into French, and optimizing your results.
Step 1: Get started
Prerequisites
- You have installed GPT for Excel.
- You have opened a workbook containing text for translation in a column.
Open the GPT for Excel add-in and run the Translate bulk tool with French as target language on a few rows to see how it works.
If you find the translation quality sufficient, go ahead and launch your bulk translation! Otherwise, check how to improve your results in Step 2.
Step 2: Improve your results
For best results, use gpt-4o, which offers higher accuracy. If your results are still not satisfactory (e.g., translations seem inaccurate, inconsistent, or don't capture the right tone), you can further improve them by considering the following approaches:
| Goal | Recommended approach |
|---|---|
| Improve source text understanding | Set the source language The source language can be detected by the AI, but defining it helps if the source text contains short ambiguous phrases. For example, "flats" could be shoes with no heels in American English, but could also be apartments in British English. |
| Ensure appropriate style | Provide specific instructions Providing context or specific rules to follow while translating improves the translation quality. You can specify the tone (formal or informal), audience, and pitfalls to avoid. |
| Maintain consistent terminology | Create a glossary Glossaries help keep translations consistent, respect corporate terminology, and ensure on-brand translations. You can copy and paste an existing glossary or create one from scratch. |
| Define the level of accuracy/freedom in the translation | Adjust the creativity level For straightforward technical translations, set a low creativity level to ensure precision. For marketing materials or creative content, increase the creativity level of your translations. |
Best practice: Compare various results by putting the results in a new column each time you change the settings.
Once you have defined the best settings for your translation project, you are ready to launch your bulk translation. Select more cells or even all cells, click Run rows, and watch GPT for Excel handle the rest of the translations.