Date of Award
Winter 3-20-2027
Document Type
Undergraduate Honors Thesis
Degree Name
B.A. in Languages, Literatures & Cultures
Organizational Unit
College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, Languages and Literatures
First Advisor
Laurel Taylor
Copyright Statement / License for Reuse
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Keywords
Artificial intelligence (AI), Machine translation, Translation, Linguistics, Large language models (LLM), Japanese, English
Abstract
This thesis highlights the recent improvements and capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically their ability to produce translations between different languages. The continued up-scaling of model sizes has led to breakthroughs in the level of their observed intelligence, allowing them to produce translations that are similar in quality to highly skilled human translators. However, to facilitate the reasoning processes that LLMs now possess, their demand for computational power and the supporting hardware and resources has increased proportionally. Considering the impacts of this technology on the environment, energy resources, and its accessibility, my research explores the possibilities of smaller, highly trained models that can run on low-level consumer hardware while still producing quality translations between languages. Through experimenting with ten small models running locally on my own desktop’s hardware, I produced, evaluated, and analyzed the generated translations created by prompting the models on Japanese to English texts in the contexts of fictional prose, historical writing, and spoken conversation. I conclude my thesis by noting that current use cases highly depend on the severity and context of the situation in which translations are being produced, but that the future of language models supporting accessible and quality translations is optimistic.
Copyright Date
9-12-2025
Publication Statement
Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.
Rights Holder
Loklin Elias Nord
Provenance
Received from Author
File Format
application/pdf
Language
English (eng)
Extent
33 pgs
File Size
369 KB
Recommended Citation
Nord, Loklin Elias, "Artificial Intelligence and Translation: Exploring Current Applications, Limitations and Future Potential of Language Models Through Japanese-English Translation" (2027). Undergraduate Theses, Capstones, and Recitals. 84.
https://digitalcommons.du.edu/undergraduate_theses/84
Included in
Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Commons, Japanese Studies Commons, Language Interpretation and Translation Commons, Programming Languages and Compilers Commons