DeepL Translator

What it is

DeepL Translator is an online translation service built on neural networks. It was developed by a team led by Jaroslaw Kutylowski within Linguee, the Cologne-based online dictionary, and released to the public in August 2017 with seven European languages. It has since added many more languages, along with paid DeepL Pro subscriptions, an API for developers and desktop and mobile apps.

How it works

Neural machine translation systems learn from very large collections of texts and their human translations. Rather than translating word by word or phrase by phrase, a neural network encodes the meaning of a whole sentence and generates a new sentence in the target language. DeepL trained its models on high-quality bilingual data, drawing on experience gained with Linguee, which had built a search engine for existing translations. The company designs its own models and runs them on its own computing infrastructure.

Why it stands out

When DeepL launched, it quickly gained a reputation among translators, journalists and businesses for producing translations that sounded more natural than those of larger rivals, especially between European languages. It showed that a relatively small German company could compete with the world's largest technology groups in an AI application used by millions. DeepL states that more than a billion people have used its services. It has since expanded into business products for companies that need secure, high-quality translation at scale, with data protection under European rules as a selling point.

Where you meet it

DeepL is used by students, professionals and companies to translate emails, documents, websites and contracts. It is built into browser extensions, office software and corporate systems through its API, and it is widely used by translators as a first draft that they then edit.