Specifically the free version, as of now. Apologies if this has been discussed before, I did not see anything that answers my question from the search engine.
I just checked with a random chapter (1.35) from Tacitus’ Annals, and the result was pretty poor.
Check this out:
Vt seditionem attigit, ubi modestia militaris, ubi veteris disciplinae decus, quonam tribunos, quo centuriones exegissent, rogitans, nudant universi corpora…
which chatgpt translates as:
‘When he touched on the matter of sedition, there, where military modesty, the glory of ancient discipline, questioning where the tribunes, where the centurions had led, they all lay bare their bodies…’
It’s kind of a mess. Rogitans relates to four clauses (starting with ubi, ubi, quonam and quo), so ‘… asking where [their] behaviour proper to soldiers [was], where [their] glory of old-fashioned discipline [had gone, vel sim.], etc.’ If it understood this, it wouldn’t have taken ubi to mean ‘there’. Also, it’s confused about the active subject of exegissent (which is also the unexpressed subject of nudant), since it’s not the tribunes or the centurions doing the driving out (which it should have known from tribunos, which is clearly accusative), but the soldiers Germanicus is addressing, who then lay bare their bodies.
Incidentally, I went back and gave it more context with a few sentences from chapter 34, but that didn’t help.
It might perform better with easier Latin, but this chapter isn’t terribly difficult.
Interesting. I did not expect such an answer. Maybe it has something to do with the fact you are giving a text with too few words to translate? Because right now I’m studying from a textbook(Teach Yourself Beginner’s Latin) and it was able to translate the paragraph on pp 41-42 perfectly afaics. Maybe it could use some stylistic editing, but it’s not bad or unacceptable at all. And based on what I’ve seen so far, chatgpt can translate really well(in general) if the text it is given is of good quantity.
I have asked it to give me a Latin paragraph in the style of Julius Caesar. It gave me the first paragraph from De Bello Gallico word for word.
I gave it Ovid Amores 1.1.1 and it told me it was the opening of Virgil’s Aeneid.
Maybe it works better for simple composition, as Chad tried last year:
I tested it on a few as well. It was woefully bad. The worst was when I gave it the 1st line of Lucan’s Pharsalia and it told me it was the first line of Horace _Odes_2.1. None of the words in that line were in the entire ode.