Prompt engineering has shown potential for improving translation quality in LLMs. However, the possibility of using translation concepts in prompt design remains largely underexplored. Against this backdrop, the current paper discusses the effectiveness of incorporating the conceptual tool of translation brief and the personas of translator and author into prompt design for translation tasks in ChatGPT. Findings suggest that, although certain elements are constructive in facilitating human-to-human communication for translation tasks, their effectiveness is limited for improving translation quality in ChatGPT. This accentuates the need for explorative research on how translation theorists and practitioners can develop the current set of conceptual tools rooted in the human-to-human communication paradigm for translation purposes in this emerging workflow involving human-machine interaction, and how translation concepts developed in translation studies can inform the training of GPT models for translation tasks.

In the field of Japanese-Chinese translation linguistics, the issue of correctly translating attributive clauses has persistently proven to be challenging. Present-day machine translation tools often fail to accurately translate attributive clauses from Japanese to Chinese. In light of this, this paper investigates the linguistic problem underlying such difficulties, namely how does the semantic role of the modified noun affect the selection of translation patterns for attributive clauses, from a linguistic perspective. To ad-dress these difficulties, a pre-edit scheme is proposed, which aims to enhance the accuracy of translation. Furthermore, we propose a novel two-step prompt strategy, which combines this pre-edit scheme with ChatGPT, currently the most widely used large language model. This prompt strategy is capable of optimizing translation input in zero-shot scenarios and has been demonstrated to improve the average translation accuracy score by over 35%.