DeepL Translator is a neural machine translation service that was launched in August 2017 and is owned by Cologne-based DeepL SE. The translating system was first developed within Linguee and launched as entity DeepL. It initially offered translations between seven European languages and has since gradually expanded to support 33 languages.
According to the developers, the service uses a newer improved architecture of neural networks, which results in a more natural sound of translations than by competing services.[5]
DeepL for Windows translating from Polish to FrenchDeepL Translate Web translating an English Wikipedia article to Spanish
The translation is said to be generated using a supercomputer that reaches 5.1 petaflops and is operated in Iceland with hydropower.[6][7]
In general, CNNs are slightly more suitable for long coherent word sequences, but they have so far not been used by the competition because of their weaknesses compared to recurrent neural networks.
The weaknesses of DeepL are compensated for by supplemental techniques, some of which are publicly known.[3][8][9]
Translator and subscription
The translator can be used for free with a limit of 1,500 characters per translation.
Microsoft Word and PowerPoint files in Office Open XML file formats (.docx and .pptx) and PDF files up to 5MB in size can also be translated.[10]
The translating system was first developed within Linguee by a team led by Chief Technology Officer Jarosław Kutyłowski (Germanised spelling: Jaroslaw Kutylowski) in 2016.
It was launched as DeepL Translator on 28 August 2017 and offered translations between English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish and Dutch.[18][19][20][7]
With the release of DeepL in 2017, Linguee's company name was changed to DeepL GmbH,[27] and it is also financed by advertising on its sister site, linguee.com.[28]
Support for Portuguese and Russian was added on 5 December 2018.[29]
In July 2019, Jarosław Kutyłowski became the CEO of DeepL GmbH[30] and restructured the company into a Societas Europaea in 2021.[31]
Support for Chinese (simplified) and Japanese was added on 19 March 2020, which the company claimed to have surpassed the aforementioned competitors as well as Baidu and Youdao.[32][33]
Then, 13 more European languages were added in March 2021: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, and Swedish, bringing the total number of supported languages to 24.[34]
On 25 May 2022, support for Indonesian and Turkish was added,[16] and support for Ukrainian was added on 14 September 2022.[17]
In January 2023, the company reached a valuation of 1 billion euro and became the most valued startup company in Cologne.[35]
In November 2022, DeepL launched a tool to improve monolingual texts in English and German, called DeepL Write.
In December, the company removed access and informed journalists that it was only for internal use and that DeepL Write would be launched in early 2023. The public beta version was then released on January 17, 2023.[37]
In the summer of 2024, DeepL announced the availability of two more languages in DeepL Write: French and Spanish. By January 2024, DeepL had added an additional two: Portuguese (European and Brazilian) and Italian.
Reception
The reception of DeepL Translator has been generally positive.
TechCrunch appreciates it for the accuracy of its translations and stating that it was more accurate and nuanced than Google Translate.[3]
Le Monde thanks its developers for translating French text into more "French-sounding" expressions.[38]
RTL Z stated that DeepL Translator "offers better translations […] when it comes to Dutch to English and vice versa".[39]
La Repubblica,[40] and a Latin American website, "WWWhat's new?", showed praise as well.[41]
A 2018 paper by the University of Bologna evaluated the Italian-to-German translation capabilities and found the preliminary results to be similar in quality to Google Translate.[42]
In September 2021, Slator remarked that the language industry response was more measured than the press and noted that DeepL is still highly regarded by users.[43]
A reviewer noted in 2018 that DeepL had far fewer languages available for translation than competing products.[29]
Awards
DeepL Translator won the 2020 Webby Award for Best Practices and the 2020 Webby Award for Technical Achievement (Apps, Mobile, and Features), both in the category Apps, Mobile & Voice.[44]
^Bahdanau, Dzmitry; Cho, Kyunghyun; Bengio, Yoshua (1 September 2014). Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate. arXiv:1409.0473.
^Pouget-Abadie, Jean; Bahdanau, Dzmitry; van Merrienboer, Bart; Cho, Kyunghyun; Bengio, Yoshua (October 2014). "Overcoming the Curse of Sentence Length for Neural Machine Translation using Automatic Segmentation". Proceedings of SSST-8, Eighth Workshop on Syntax, Semantics and Structure in Statistical Translation. Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics: 78–85. arXiv:1409.1257. doi:10.3115/v1/w14-4009. S2CID353451.
