What Exactly is DeepL?
The DeepL Translator has taken off like a rocket and is going strong. It is the new miracle in AI (artificial intelligence) translation because it translates as fast as other translation machines like Google Translate and Microsoft Bing Translator. However, its translations sound more natural. So, what is DeepL?
DeepL is a German company founded by the developers of Linguee. DeepL’s focus is to develop more AI products for the language industry. The company released its DeepL Translator in late August 2017 featuring English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, and Dutch language translation. Russian and Portuguese were added in December 2018 due to user demand. They continue to add more languages and next they will release Chinese and Japanese.
How Does the DeepL Translator Work?
Since DeepL uses linguee.com as a resource, it already has a huge collection of curated translation data at its disposal. It uses neural machine translation. This is one of the many approaches for machine translation, predicting the sequence of words in a sentence.
DeepL, however, does not want to talk about the specific model they use. Other companies have made theirs open source. Nevertheless, Jaroslaw Kutylowski, DeepL Chief Technology Officer, says that they keep on top of the current science of machine translation and combine their findings with their own ideas and experiences having developed DeepL.
The “Men vs. Machine” Debate
The release of this unexpectedly accurate machine translator by DeepL has enflamed the debate about human and machine translation once again. While some translators fear for their jobs, others stay calm. They are rather interested in what is technologically possible.
The Translator is free and accessible to everyone on the DeepL website. Most noteworthy, you can translate whole documents in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint without losing formatting. Nevertheless, it does save information about what was translated for training purposes. Thanks to European Union Law, however, the information is not allowed to be given to third parties. The paid version, DeepL Pro, does not save information for training purposes. This is where it gets interesting for professional translators because this way, client confidentiality is guaranteed.
The Perks for the Translation Business
Professional translators can use it not only on the DeepL webpage. Thanks to its API (Application Programming Interface), it works with other apps and translation environment tools such as SDL Trados Suite 2017.
In a nutshell, we will always be in need of human translators for translating for example, idioms or more complex texts. But the latest trends in neural machine translation make the translator’s job a little more comfortable and a lot more efficient. Here at LingoStar, we provide a range of language services including translation, voiceovers, interpreting services and more! Should you be in the need of website translation or website localization, please contact us. For more information, call 604-629-8420 or email info@lingo-star.com to discuss your next language-related project. You can also submit a free quote via our website dev.lingo-star.com. We are here to help!
