Translalia Guidance Notes

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Create a workspace. Workspaces are simply a way of organising your chats: for instance if you dedicate several chats to working on the same poem you might want to group them in a single workspace.

Then open a New chat: this takes you into the Workshop. A Chat encompasses a single stretch of translation process, i.e. one period of engagement with a poem (or other short text).

Paste the text you want to work with into the window on the left and click Submit Poem.

You will then be asked to adjust or confirm the Segments that the app is going to work on. Often these are stanzas, but sometimes it might make sense for the app to consider a long sentence or other group of lines: use the drop-down buttons on the right to adjust the segments to your liking. Alternatively, you can ignore this step and just click Confirm Segments to accept the way the app has divided up your text. 

Next, towards the right of the screen, you can enter information about the Source language variety, the Translation zone (ie, the kind of language you are interested in translating into), and your Intent for the translation. It can be fun to try out different options here and see what effect they have. NB, remember to click save after each choice. Next: Translation range: this controls the breadth of possibilities Translalia will offer you.  Finally, Translation model: which of the available OpenAI models do you want to use? Generally, GPT-4o offers the best balance of speed and sensitivity. If you want to explore a wider range of languages and varieties, or especially unusual or complex language, one of the GPT-5 models is likely to be better, but please note that they are likely to think for a good deal longer (sometimes 2 or 3 minutes). Again, it can be interesting to try out the various options and see what difference they make. 

When you click Start Workshop you will be taken to a screen with Workshop on the left and Notebook on the right. The workshop is where Translalia offers you material to work with: the Notebook is where you compose your translation.

It usually takes a minute or so for Translalia to come up with the various possible translations that it will offer you. This might be an opportunity for you to look again at your poem - or to look out of the window. 

When the possible translations are ready you can click on the segments and then the lines (highlighted in green) in the Workshop to reveal them; alternatively you can click on the lines under ‘source’ in your notebook. You can click on any of the words to move it across into your Notebook; you can edit the words, move them around or write others. To save your progress, press save all.

If you want more suggestions for a whole line, click the Get More Suggestions button at the foot of the Workshop. If you want more suggestions for a particular word, right-click on it.  

You can record any thoughts in the Notes section at the bottom of your notebook: at a later stage you can (if you like) ask Translalia to make some comment on them.

Once you have got to the end of this gradual work with words, click Full Comparison at the top right of your Notebook to read and revise your translation as a whole: you can edit it as you might any document.

If you like, you can close ‘full comparison’ and go the Editing pane to the right of your Notebook. Here, Translalia will make proposals for how you might approach rhymes and other formal features in your source text and translation.  LLMs are generally not very good at sound patterns (though GPT-5 may be better than GPT-4) so please treat these suggestions with caution! If nothing else, they may prompt some different ideas in your own imagination.

In this same pane, Translation Insights will show you what Translalia makes of any notes you may have made. Journey Summary will offer some comment on the choices you have made in translating.

Your translation will be saved in your Diary – click on the open book icon, top right, to access it.