Just for fun, this was Opus’s attempt at translation with the prompt: “I saw this in a commercial for tea. Please translate: 「美味ちい」Keep an eye out for wordplay or cultural difference that would matter in the translation.”

This is clever Japanese wordplay! 「美味ちい」 is a pun that combines:

• 美味しい (oishii) = "delicious"
• 茶 (cha) = “tea”

They’ve replaced the し (shi) in “oishii” with ち (chi), creating a portmanteau that sounds like “oichii.” This blends “delicious” with a phonetic hint at “tea” (since ち/chi is close to ちゃ/cha).

Translation: “Deli-tea-ous” or “Tea-licious”

In English, we’d need a similar pun to capture the playful spirit. The commercial is essentially making a tea-specific version of the word “delicious” - it’s a fun bit of marketing language that suggests the tea is so good it deserves its own special adjective!

Interestingly, Anthropic’s newer (but smaller) model, Sonnet 4.5, doesn’t catch on without following up with something to the effect of, “What is tea in Japanese?” LLMs showed pretty amazing multilingual capabilities before they even started intentionally training them with more languages. That said, you definitively still need someone who speaks both languages to check/guide em. As it is their way to bullshit.