Hacker News Reader

Comment by kukabynd | Hacker News Reader

Definitely would love to learn more about your use case. Recently I started to use DeepL and it’s great if the language selection is enough for you.

View on HN

Personally I have found DeepL to be more accurate in the languages they support than Google Translate. They used to support much less, but for the languages it did, it was pretty great. It supports way more now though!

Still no Turkish on DeepL, even though it is one of the most widely spoken languages across much of Europe and uses the Latin alphabet.

Yet tiny European languages like Latvian are supported, as are very difficult translation targets such as Estonian and Hungarian.

My hopes are dashed every time they add another tiny European language and Turkish remains off the table. :-(

Contrary to Turkish, Estonian, Latvian and Hungarian are all EU official languages. That means that all EU legislation is legally required to be translated to these languages and it is readily available in all these languages for free to train the AI model for translating to those languages.

Indeed, also see linguee.com which uses (mainly) official EU documents to feed an enormous amount of word and phrase translations. Beautiful site that I've been using a long time - and only learn this minute that they are in fact also owned by deepL.

I am unsure if the support for those languages are better vs. Google Translate, but the small set of languages it used to support a year ago or something is definitely better. I remember French and Spanish being way better. DeepL's Polish is not that great, that I can say for certain! Not sure if better than Google Translate's though.

Qualitatively better, or quantitatively? If the latter, do you have some metrics you can share?

Qualitatively.

> do you have some metrics you can share?

Not really. Try to have discussions using DeepL and Google Translate. Ask native speakers which one was more accurate and whatnot.

I do not know French, but DeepL allowed me to speak to someone using the language, and apparently at some point some people thought I was a native speaker!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com