Type of site | Neural machine translation |
---|---|
Available in | 32 languages |
Headquarters | Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany |
Owner | DeepL SE |
Key people | Jaroslaw Kutylowski |
URL | deepl.com/translator |
Commercial | Yes |
Registration | Optional |
Launched | 28 August 2017 |
Current status | Active |
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 32 languages.
Its algorithm uses convolutional neural networks and an English pivot. [1] It offers a paid subscription for additional features and access to its translation application programming interface. [2]
The service uses a proprietary algorithm with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) [3] that have been trained with the Linguee database. [4] [5] 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] 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]
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 can also be translated. [10]
It offers paid subscription DeepL Pro, which has been available since March 2018 and includes application programming interface access and a software plug-in for computer-assisted translation tools, including SDL Trados Studio. [11] Unlike the free version, translated texts are stated to not be saved on the server; also, the character limit is removed. [12] The monthly pricing model includes a set amount of text, with texts beyond that being calculated according to the number of characters. [13]
As of June 2024, the translation service supports the following languages: [14] [15]
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] At its launch, it claimed to have surpassed its competitors in blind tests and BLEU scores, including Google Translate, Amazon Translate, Microsoft Translator and Facebook's translation feature. [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] 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] Translation software for Microsoft Windows and macOS was released in September 2019. [12] 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. [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] - at the end of the month, support for Korean and Norwegian (Bokmål) was also added. [36]
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 finally released on January 17, 2023. [37]
Reception of DeepL Translator in 2017 was generally positive, with TechCrunch appreciating it for the accuracy of its translations and stating that it was more accurate and nuanced than Google Translate, [3] and Le Monde thanking its developers for translating French text into more "French-sounding" expressions. [38] A news article from the website of the Dutch television channel RTL Z stated that DeepL Translator "offers better translations […] when it comes to Dutch to English and vice versa". [39] An Italian newspaper, La Repubblica , [40] and a Latin American website, "WWWhat's new?", showed praise as well. [41]
The press noted that it had far fewer languages available for translation than competing products. [29] 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 it is still highly regarded. [43]
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]
Machine translation is use of either rule-based or probabilistic machine learning approaches to translation of text or speech from one language to another, including the contextual, idiomatic and pragmatic nuances of both languages.
Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also known as automatic speech recognition (ASR), computer speech recognition or speech-to-text (STT). It incorporates knowledge and research in the computer science, linguistics and computer engineering fields. The reverse process is speech synthesis.
A parallel text is a text placed alongside its translation or translations. Parallel text alignment is the identification of the corresponding sentences in both halves of the parallel text. The Loeb Classical Library and the Clay Sanskrit Library are two examples of dual-language series of texts. Reference Bibles may contain the original languages and a translation, or several translations by themselves, for ease of comparison and study; Origen's Hexapla placed six versions of the Old Testament side by side. A famous example is the Rosetta Stone, whose discovery allowed the Ancient Egyptian language to begin being deciphered.
Geoffrey Everest Hinton is a British-Canadian computer scientist and cognitive psychologist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks. From 2013 to 2023, he divided his time working for Google and the University of Toronto, before publicly announcing his departure from Google in May 2023, citing concerns about the risks of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. In 2017, he co-founded and became the chief scientific advisor of the Vector Institute in Toronto.
Google Translate is a multilingual neural machine translation service developed by Google to translate text, documents and websites from one language into another. It offers a website interface, a mobile app for Android and iOS, as well as an API that helps developers build browser extensions and software applications. As of June 2024, Google Translate supports 133 languages at various levels. It claimed over 500 million total users as of April 2016, with more than 100 billion words translated daily, after the company stated in May 2013 that it served over 200 million people daily.
Microsoft Translator is a multilingual machine translation cloud service provided by Microsoft. Microsoft Translator is a part of Microsoft Cognitive Services and integrated across multiple consumer, developer, and enterprise products, including Bing, Microsoft Office, SharePoint, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Lync, Yammer, Skype Translator, Visual Studio, and Microsoft Translator apps for Windows, Windows Phone, iPhone and Apple Watch, and Android phone and Android Wear.
Applications Technology (AppTek) is a U.S. company headquartered in McLean, Virginia that specializes in artificial intelligence and machine learning for human language technologies. The company provides both managed and professional services for natural language processing (NLP) technologies including automatic speech recognition (ASR), neural machine translation (MT), natural-language understanding (NLU) and neural speech synthesis. AppTek's automatic speech recognition covers over 45 languages and dialects. The neural MT engine covers over 1000 language pairs between languages.
The International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters (IAPTI) is an international professional association of translators and interpreters based in Argentina.
Linguee is an online bilingual concordance that provides an online dictionary for a number of language pairs, including many bilingual sentence pairs. As a translation aid, Linguee differs from machine translation services like Babel Fish, and is more similar in function to a translation memory. Linguee is operated by Cologne-based DeepL GmbH, which was established in Cologne in December 2008.
Alexander Waibel is a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Waibel's research interests focus on speech recognition and translation and human communication signals and systems. Alex Waibel made pioneering contributions to speech translation systems, breaking down language barriers through cross-lingual speech communication. In fundamental research on machine learning, he is known for the Time Delay Neural Network (TDNN), the first Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) trained by gradient descent, using backpropagation. Alex Waibel introduced the TDNN in 1987 at ATR in Japan.
Deep learning is the subset of machine learning methods based on neural networks with representation learning. The adjective "deep" refers to the use of multiple layers in the network. Methods used can be either supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised.
ProMT is a lead Russian developer of language translation software for businesses and private users since 1991. The company provides on-premises software based on neural technologies.
Google Brain was a deep learning artificial intelligence research team under the umbrella of Google AI, a research division at Google dedicated to artificial intelligence. Formed in 2011, it combined open-ended machine learning research with information systems and large-scale computing resources. It created tools such as TensorFlow, which allow neural networks to be used by the public, and multiple internal AI research projects, and aimed to create research opportunities in machine learning and natural language processing. It was merged into former Google sister company DeepMind to form Google DeepMind in April 2023.
Yandex Translate is a web service provided by Yandex, intended for the translation of web pages into another language.
Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún is a Nigerian linguist, writer, translator, scholar, and cultural activist. His work and influence span the fields of education, language technology, literature, journalism, and linguistics. He is the recipient of the 2016 Premio Ostana "Special Prize" for Writings in the Mother Tongue for his work in language advocacy. He writes in Yoruba and English, and is currently the Africa editor of the Best Literary Translations anthology, published by Deep Vellum.
Translate.com is a human-powered translation service based in Chicago, Illinois. The company offers a web-based human translation subscription platform in combination with artificial intelligence technologies.
Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) was a neural machine translation (NMT) system developed by Google and introduced in November 2016 that used an artificial neural network to increase fluency and accuracy in Google Translate. The neural network consisted of two main blocks, an encoder and a decoder, both of LSTM architecture with 8 1024-wide layers each and a simple 1-layer 1024-wide feedforward attention mechanism connecting them. The total number of parameters has been variously described as over 160 million, approximately 210 million, 278 million or 380 million. By 2020, the system had been replaced by another deep learning system based on transformers.
Reverso is a French company specialized in AI-based language tools, translation aids, and language services. These include online translation based on neural machine translation (NMT), contextual dictionaries, online bilingual concordances, grammar and spell checking and conjugation tools.
Otter.ai, Inc. is a Mountain View, California-based technology company that develops speech to text transcription applications using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Its software, called Otter, shows captions for live speakers, and generates written transcriptions of speech.
Rev is an American speech-to-text company that provides closed captioning, subtitles, and transcription services. The company, based in San Francisco and Austin, was founded in 2010.