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While this is great, I like to give a shout out to DeepL Translator [1]. I'm not affiliated with them but I like to recommend them to people who like to step ou

While this is great, I like to give a shout out to DeepL Translator [1]. I'm not affiliated with them but I like to recommend them to people who like to step out of Google ecosystem. I am using DeepL for about a year now and I mostly use it for NL<->EN, DE<->EN. So far, I never felt that the translation is off, or terrible, and if not better in some cases, it's as good as Google Translator. [1]: https://www.deepl.com/translator https://www.deepl.com/translator

enriquto 7y ago
I find the deepl translations in the available languages very good, much better than google translate. Unfortunately, the selection of languages is (still) very limited.
baq 7y ago
i've just tried it out and am positively blown away by the quality of translation.
- needle0 7y ago
  I'll be blown away when it does near-perfect JP/EN translation (which it doesn't even seem to support). No machine translation has ever been close to being remotely good when it comes to JP/EN, including the ones developed by GAFAM.
odiroot 7y ago
I found it to work incredible between Polish and German as well.
Canova 7y ago
> Translate from any language only has 9 language options(8 if you exclude the dest language).
distances 7y ago
> So far, I never felt that the translation is off, or terrible, and if not better in some cases, it's as good as Google Translator. In my experience Deepl is consistently, without fail, considerably better than Google Translate. I basically use Google now only for more exotic language pairs, or full-page translations.
- agiamas 7y ago
  same here. Admittedly it supports just a few language pairs but the translation quality is consistently and considerably better than Google Translate and other major offerings.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  For Spanish, at least, it definitely isn't better than Google. And recently everything I had to look up while reading Gabriel García Márquez, DeepL didn't know. After enough failures I gave up and returned to Google Translate for the remainder of the book.
  - TuringTest 7y ago
    Google may have a wider range of words, but DeepL is definitely much better in grammar and idioms, which Google tends to translate literally. Moreover, Google often provides a single target word; whereas DeepL allows you to select from a range of synonyms clicking on a word, and will adjust the sentence accordingly to use the new word. When Google gets the context wrong and provides the wrong meaning for the translation, DeepL's capability to translate with a different meaning is invaluable.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- _emacsomancer_ 7y ago
  > more exotic language pairs I've found that sometimes what Google does for these is translate from Language A > English, and then English > Language B, which leads to bizarre results.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    From reports, Google Translate has effectively created its own internal (AI GD ML) metalanguage, which can interpolate between languages it's not been specifically trained on. E.g., with Japanese <-> English and Korean <-> English, Google Translate can manage Japanese <-> Korean, without being specifically trained to do so. So yes, there's an intermediary language. But it's not English. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2114748-google-translate-ai-invents-its-own-language-to-translate-with/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2114748-google-translat...
gauMah 7y ago
I have used it for translating several academic writeups, including proposals and papers from English to German. It works like a charm. Also, translates German official letters from banks and government, to English pretty well.
reacweb 7y ago
I use it since 2 years, mainly for French->English and occasionaly for English->French. I love it. It understand very well idioms and propose excellent translations. Even for traduction of single words, it is far better than google.
Vinnl 7y ago
As far as I've seen that doesn't support translating web pages other than copy-pasting the text you want to translate... Unless I'm missing something. So HN, tell me, how do I get to that functionality, if it's there?
Yessing 7y ago
During a C1 German course I took, I tried writing an essay In English, using deepl and then submitting it to the teacher. Only manual thing done is choosing the correct alternative from the list of words deepl gives you. The Teacher said that it was amazing and that many native students she had couldn't write that well.
- vinay427 7y ago
  This seems really quite variable. The second sentence I tried DE->EN ended up with an awkward and confusing literal translation of a phrase that Google Translate handled well.
iserlohnmage 7y ago
In the firm I made my internship, we have to use German in every communication. I use DeepL to check my E-mail or help me write speech for the presentation, etc (not a native speaker). The translator is wonderful!
syntaxing 7y ago
This is great, never even heard of them before! Would you happen to have other suggestions to Google service alternatives?
rlv-dan 7y ago
My experience so far is that DeepL gives the best translations, then Bing and last Google.
azepoi 7y ago
DeepL really shines when not translating to or from english. I find their FR<->DE fantastic, miles ahead of Google's.
t0astbread 7y ago
Sometimes after writing a text I decide to throw it into DeepL for shits and giggles and the translations are pretty much as good as native every time.
mantap 7y ago
It looks useful but the lack of non-European languages makes me slightly suspicious, I wonder if their approach generalises to Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, etc.
- needle0 7y ago
  Perhaps I'm too jaded, but it comes off to me as copping out of the truly difficult ones!
  - eyegor 7y ago
    If you know of a good source for large piles of docs that have been accurately/naturally translated eng/ch/jp, I'm sure deepl would be interested. As another poster pointed out, any deep learning NLP project boils down to quantity+quality of data. I'm assuming adversarial approaches don't work well in this context but I'm not very familiar with nlp research.
    - mantap 7y ago
      Right but that's kind of the essence of machine translation. You won't always have high quality parallel training data for all languages so you have to find a way to thrive with low quality data. Google has clearly made it their mission to solve that problem, and I'd say they've been rather successful.
- yorwba 7y ago
  It depends on which part of their approch you focus on. I'd expect their machine translation model to be sufficiently general to support basically any language given enough training data. Yes, the languages you listed have some edge cases, but so do languages they already support fine. For example, the lack of spaces separating words in Chinese and Japanese can be handled by the same word-piece segmentation they need for German compound words. The bigger problem is likely to be lack of training data. Unless they have a pile of cash to pay professional translators to produce a parallel corpus, the alternative is to scrape translations from the internet. Basically, crawl the same site multiple times with different Accept-Language headers and try to align the results. Crucially, this depends on an existing ecosystem of bilingual websites with high-quality human translations. According to DeepL's website they're a spin-off of Linguee, who provide a search service for exactly that kind of parallel data. So before DeepL starts supporting any given language pair, you should expect it to appear in Linguee first. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguee Edit: It took me a while to figure out how to select a different language on https://linguee.com https://linguee.com (Their UI seems broken using mobile Firefox Preview.) Appending /english-chinese and /english-japanese to the URL shows that they already support those two, and the alignment of translations appears reasonable to me. No /english-arabic, though.
janeshmane 7y ago
I was hoping to use them for an application, but their API pricing is orders of magnitude higher than Google's and Microsoft's. I guess they must be focused on the web application primarily.
dredmorbius 7y ago
I'd meant to add this to my DDG !bang list yesterday: !deepl
mehdix 7y ago
I was also looking for a Google alternative and recently discoverd them on pons.com and am very happy with the results which are often DE <-> EN.
pluc 7y ago
I lived in Germany for a bit and Deepl is what everyone recommended over Google for professional translation. Google is great to figure out how to ask for your schnitzel at the shop, but Deepl is for when you want to make a deal.
- lucb1e 7y ago
  Another Luc here that lives in Germany since a bit (yes, I know you said "for a bit") and recommends Deepl to everyone over Google :D
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    I’m not sure about European English, but at least in American, it’s not normal to say “I live in Germany since a bit”. If you don’t live there anymore, you could say “I lived in Germany for a bit”. If you still live there, you could say “I have lived in Germany for a bit”
    - Furiosity 7y ago
      Based on some (limited) experience with people for whom German is L1 who are speaking English I suspect (without knowing any German myself) that this is a typical formation that a native German speaker would use when intending to form a "for a bit" phrase in English. tl;dr, I think it was a joke.
giancarlostoro 7y ago
That's really good, I even tried olden English to an extent to Spanish, and it still went through.
ezconnect 7y ago
Sadly there's no korean to english.
cyberax 7y ago
OK, some observations. It looks like they used the UN official documents as a part of their corpus, so it translates regular news from Russian into English almost perfectly. I was actually stunned how good the translation was. But once you step away from it, quality goes down. I tried translating random pieces of Russian literature and it makes obvious mistakes. It can't even manage the structure of sentences, never mind word choice. Translations from English are also bad. For example, it translated "I never felt that the translation is off" as "I never felt that the translation is turned off".

enriquto 7y ago

I find the deepl translations in the available languages very good, much better than google translate. Unfortunately, the selection of languages is (still) very limited.

baq 7y ago

i've just tried it out and am positively blown away by the quality of translation.

needle0 7y ago
I'll be blown away when it does near-perfect JP/EN translation (which it doesn't even seem to support). No machine translation has ever been close to being remotely good when it comes to JP/EN, including the ones developed by GAFAM.

odiroot 7y ago

I found it to work incredible between Polish and German as well.

Canova 7y ago

> Translate from any language only has 9 language options(8 if you exclude the dest language).

distances 7y ago

> So far, I never felt that the translation is off, or terrible, and if not better in some cases, it's as good as Google Translator. In my experience Deepl is consistently, without fail, considerably better than Google Translate. I basically use Google now only for more exotic language pairs, or full-page translations.

agiamas 7y ago
same here. Admittedly it supports just a few language pairs but the translation quality is consistently and considerably better than Google Translate and other major offerings.
hombre_fatal 7y ago
For Spanish, at least, it definitely isn't better than Google. And recently everything I had to look up while reading Gabriel García Márquez, DeepL didn't know. After enough failures I gave up and returned to Google Translate for the remainder of the book.
- TuringTest 7y ago
  Google may have a wider range of words, but DeepL is definitely much better in grammar and idioms, which Google tends to translate literally. Moreover, Google often provides a single target word; whereas DeepL allows you to select from a range of synonyms clicking on a word, and will adjust the sentence accordingly to use the new word. When Google gets the context wrong and provides the wrong meaning for the translation, DeepL's capability to translate with a different meaning is invaluable.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
_emacsomancer_ 7y ago
> more exotic language pairs I've found that sometimes what Google does for these is translate from Language A > English, and then English > Language B, which leads to bizarre results.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  From reports, Google Translate has effectively created its own internal (AI GD ML) metalanguage, which can interpolate between languages it's not been specifically trained on. E.g., with Japanese <-> English and Korean <-> English, Google Translate can manage Japanese <-> Korean, without being specifically trained to do so. So yes, there's an intermediary language. But it's not English. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2114748-google-translate-ai-invents-its-own-language-to-translate-with/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2114748-google-translat...

gauMah 7y ago

I have used it for translating several academic writeups, including proposals and papers from English to German. It works like a charm. Also, translates German official letters from banks and government, to English pretty well.

reacweb 7y ago

I use it since 2 years, mainly for French->English and occasionaly for English->French. I love it. It understand very well idioms and propose excellent translations. Even for traduction of single words, it is far better than google.

Vinnl 7y ago

As far as I've seen that doesn't support translating web pages other than copy-pasting the text you want to translate... Unless I'm missing something. So HN, tell me, how do I get to that functionality, if it's there?

Yessing 7y ago

During a C1 German course I took, I tried writing an essay In English, using deepl and then submitting it to the teacher. Only manual thing done is choosing the correct alternative from the list of words deepl gives you. The Teacher said that it was amazing and that many native students she had couldn't write that well.

vinay427 7y ago
This seems really quite variable. The second sentence I tried DE->EN ended up with an awkward and confusing literal translation of a phrase that Google Translate handled well.

iserlohnmage 7y ago

In the firm I made my internship, we have to use German in every communication. I use DeepL to check my E-mail or help me write speech for the presentation, etc (not a native speaker). The translator is wonderful!

syntaxing 7y ago

This is great, never even heard of them before! Would you happen to have other suggestions to Google service alternatives?

rlv-dan 7y ago

My experience so far is that DeepL gives the best translations, then Bing and last Google.

azepoi 7y ago

DeepL really shines when not translating to or from english. I find their FR<->DE fantastic, miles ahead of Google's.

t0astbread 7y ago

Sometimes after writing a text I decide to throw it into DeepL for shits and giggles and the translations are pretty much as good as native every time.

mantap 7y ago

It looks useful but the lack of non-European languages makes me slightly suspicious, I wonder if their approach generalises to Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, etc.

needle0 7y ago
Perhaps I'm too jaded, but it comes off to me as copping out of the truly difficult ones!
- eyegor 7y ago
  If you know of a good source for large piles of docs that have been accurately/naturally translated eng/ch/jp, I'm sure deepl would be interested. As another poster pointed out, any deep learning NLP project boils down to quantity+quality of data. I'm assuming adversarial approaches don't work well in this context but I'm not very familiar with nlp research.
  - mantap 7y ago
    Right but that's kind of the essence of machine translation. You won't always have high quality parallel training data for all languages so you have to find a way to thrive with low quality data. Google has clearly made it their mission to solve that problem, and I'd say they've been rather successful.
yorwba 7y ago
It depends on which part of their approch you focus on. I'd expect their machine translation model to be sufficiently general to support basically any language given enough training data. Yes, the languages you listed have some edge cases, but so do languages they already support fine. For example, the lack of spaces separating words in Chinese and Japanese can be handled by the same word-piece segmentation they need for German compound words. The bigger problem is likely to be lack of training data. Unless they have a pile of cash to pay professional translators to produce a parallel corpus, the alternative is to scrape translations from the internet. Basically, crawl the same site multiple times with different Accept-Language headers and try to align the results. Crucially, this depends on an existing ecosystem of bilingual websites with high-quality human translations. According to DeepL's website they're a spin-off of Linguee, who provide a search service for exactly that kind of parallel data. So before DeepL starts supporting any given language pair, you should expect it to appear in Linguee first. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguee Edit: It took me a while to figure out how to select a different language on https://linguee.com https://linguee.com (Their UI seems broken using mobile Firefox Preview.) Appending /english-chinese and /english-japanese to the URL shows that they already support those two, and the alignment of translations appears reasonable to me. No /english-arabic, though.

janeshmane 7y ago

I was hoping to use them for an application, but their API pricing is orders of magnitude higher than Google's and Microsoft's. I guess they must be focused on the web application primarily.

dredmorbius 7y ago

I'd meant to add this to my DDG !bang list yesterday: !deepl

mehdix 7y ago

I was also looking for a Google alternative and recently discoverd them on pons.com and am very happy with the results which are often DE <-> EN.

pluc 7y ago

I lived in Germany for a bit and Deepl is what everyone recommended over Google for professional translation. Google is great to figure out how to ask for your schnitzel at the shop, but Deepl is for when you want to make a deal.

lucb1e 7y ago
Another Luc here that lives in Germany since a bit (yes, I know you said "for a bit") and recommends Deepl to everyone over Google :D
- umanwizard 7y ago
  I’m not sure about European English, but at least in American, it’s not normal to say “I live in Germany since a bit”. If you don’t live there anymore, you could say “I lived in Germany for a bit”. If you still live there, you could say “I have lived in Germany for a bit”
  - Furiosity 7y ago
    Based on some (limited) experience with people for whom German is L1 who are speaking English I suspect (without knowing any German myself) that this is a typical formation that a native German speaker would use when intending to form a "for a bit" phrase in English. tl;dr, I think it was a joke.

giancarlostoro 7y ago

That's really good, I even tried olden English to an extent to Spanish, and it still went through.

ezconnect 7y ago

Sadly there's no korean to english.

cyberax 7y ago

OK, some observations. It looks like they used the UN official documents as a part of their corpus, so it translates regular news from Russian into English almost perfectly. I was actually stunned how good the translation was. But once you step away from it, quality goes down. I tried translating random pieces of Russian literature and it makes obvious mistakes. It can't even manage the structure of sentences, never mind word choice. Translations from English are also bad. For example, it translated "I never felt that the translation is off" as "I never felt that the translation is turned off".