Bilateral Treaties and Machine Translation: An Experiment in GPT-4 Translation Performance

Translation of international treaties has been one of the trending topics in the legal translation field (Biel 2006; 2017; Felici 2010; Prieto Ramos 2011; 2014; 2015; 2017; Prieto Ramos and Cerutti 2021; 2023; Šarčević 1997; Zhao and Cao 2013), for the complexity of it involving multiple languages and yet keeping the authenticity of each official language version. Despite the fact that the same principle echoes in bilateral treaties, very few studies have been conducted into the translation of this type of legal document (Khachatryan and Voskanyan 2022; Loiacono and Bertoli 2018), let alone in the Spanish-Chinese language pair.