  The recently released ChatGPT has demonstrated surprising abilities in
natural language understanding and natural language generation. Machine
translation relies heavily 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
commercial translation systems for high-resource language translations. We
further evaluate the translation quality using multiple references, and ChatGPT
achieves superior performance compared to commercial 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.
