Cologne-based translation startup DeepL is worth a billion dollars (German)

What it (or rather, I) struggle with is single word translations. Instead of coming up with a number of options, it'll just give you one possible translation—the obvious one that you weren't looking for. On desktop you can then click on the word but those suggestions are.... let's say AI-like. Not necessarily wrong, but not like a proper enumeration of options like you'd get from a translation dictionary. I then try to give it context, but still it sometimes just insists on giving you the word you don't want and you need to look for a different translator. (For German–English there is dict.cc, but for Dutch or other languages I often end up doing a regular web search.)

This being said Google Translation got much better recently.

Note that if you want to see DeepL in use with a variety of languages, you can check the /r/europe subreddit. It's commonly used to translate national language articles into English.

I use it whenever I need to write any long-form English->Swedish - it simply cuts out the labor of thinking about grammar and spelling, and even handles idiomatic phrases perfectly. Also works perfectly in the other direction.

Also great with English->Spanish and the reverse.

I even used it to translate some official documents from Spanish into both English and Swedish for the tax authorities in both countries - no-one thought the translated documents seemed unprofessional, in any way, or questioned any of the complex legal terminology.

I barely try Google translate anymore. A couple of times when I've thought the DeepL translation was slightly 'off', I've tried Google and the result is usually comical garbage.

I also have a DeepL competitor in my EU country and their hiring practices are similar, rarely hiring, and mostly senior devs and ML PHD grads from the local university. And they're not paying insane salaries either, which probably explains why they hire so rarely. It doesn't help that up until recently Meta and Google were sucking away all the local ML talent to their offices in US/London/Zurich for n times the local ML wages.

DepL is probably in a business that's difficult to monetize successfully because:

1) it's just difficult to successfully polish and scale up products of big-tech complexity when you don't have big-tech money.

2) many situations still require translations be done by a certified professional (educational, legal, immigration, documents, contracts, medical records, etc)

3) for the casual use case of tourist/travels, Google's point the camera at things and get the translation, is something DeepL is missing, and those consumers are unlikely to pay any subscription fees when Google does it for "free" anyway

4) human certified translators are still relatively cheap in the EU due to the oversupply of grads in this domain (their wages are trash most of the times) so there's no economic market pressure to automate humans out of this job

5) It's rare, but sometimes DeepL still makes pretty big mistakes, making it unusable for professional scenarios without humans proofing the final result (once, it translated the German word "Post" from a sentence to "the German post office" in English, even though the text was about the Austrian post office lol. I guess it's because their models were trained on texts from Germany mostly so "Post" in German texts must always be "the German post office" to them even though German is officially used in ~5 countries. Or sometimes DeepL emits several words from a sentence changing the meaning completely, etc.)

The company I work for has the webpage UI in nearly a dozen languages, and all translations are done by professional humans, because despite DeepL being the best, it's not always perfect, and no company will risk its reputation by having translation mistakes on its home page.

Competing is an understatement, for all the (European) languages I have used, Deepl is the closest to native I have ever seen. Been using them since the pandemic and pretty happy with it.

Not sure what they are doing under the hood but they are not competing they are eating google's lunch in the translation domain.

"Unicorn" status

Cologne-based translation start-up DeepL is worth a billion dollars

A German platform has been competing with Google Translate for some time. The young company has now completed a new round of financing and is regarded as the first "unicorn" from Cologne.

The online translation service DeepL from Cologne is valued at one billion dollars (960 million euros) after a new round of financing. This was reported on Thursday by the “Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger”, citing information from the company environment. DeepL is thus the first "unicorn" from the cathedral city.

The financiers of the financing round include the US investors IVP and Bessemer and the European venture capitalist Atomico, as "Business Insider" initially reported. It was initially unclear how many shares the companies would take over. DeepL did not respond to a request as of Thursday afternoon. A »unicorn« is a term used to describe start-ups with a market valuation of more than one billion US dollars.

DeepL started in Cologne in 2017 and now employs around 400 people. The website deepl.com with the translation service is one of the hundred most visited sites worldwide. DeepL says it has achieved exceptional machine translation quality with improvements in neural network mathematics and methodology, and is up to six times more accurate than other providers.

Even in independent tests, DeepL overshadowed established providers such as Google Translate. However, Google supports 133 languages, DeepL only 29. DeepL translates up to 5,000 characters and up to three documents per month for free - unlimited and other features require a subscription.