4 ms·

> 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

> 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
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_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
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- 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...
  - bzbarsky 7y ago
    The intermediary language is not English, but due to the way the training set is constructed (pairs of texts in various languages, with the vast majority of pairs having English as one of the languages, is my understanding) it can be very hard to tell apart from English sometimes. For example, translating "рубанок" ("plane", in the sense of the carpenter's tool) from Russian to Polish used to produce "samolot" ("airplane") in Google translate up until sometime earlier this year, because in the intermediate representation "plane" was ambiguous just like it is in English. It looks like that particular bit is fixed now, which is at least progress! Maybe they've been adding more non-English text pairs...
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      That's almost certainly accurate. The metalanguage / interlingua isn't English, but being based on A <-> English and B <-> English training, is all but certainly influenced by English grammar, words, and idioms, in ways that direct A <->B training would not be.
  - _emacsomancer_ 7y ago
    It seems to be 'fixed' now, but once I was trying to translate from Hindi to Nepali (which are actually closely-related languages, think Italian and Spanish) with a simple sentence along the lines 'Ram came', where 'Ram' is a common Hindu name (effectively: 'John'), written in Devanagari with a long vowel: राम (rām). And I gave the Hindi input in devanagari (राम आ गया), but still the Nepali translation ended up being the equivalent of 'the sheep came' (भेडा आयो), so somewhere along the line it seemed to be treating the name राम (rām) as equivalent to the English string 'ram' and translating accordingly. So if the intermediate language isn't English, it certainly has some English-like properties....
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subandi 7y ago
It's way off 'never off', I work with colleagues who use it en <> de. For example it will always translate 'order' in a sentence as 'Befehl' (I order you to fix a steak) instead of 'Bestellung' (I order a steak). Both are correct, but completely different, and in our context we never mean the former.

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...
- bzbarsky 7y ago
  The intermediary language is not English, but due to the way the training set is constructed (pairs of texts in various languages, with the vast majority of pairs having English as one of the languages, is my understanding) it can be very hard to tell apart from English sometimes. For example, translating "рубанок" ("plane", in the sense of the carpenter's tool) from Russian to Polish used to produce "samolot" ("airplane") in Google translate up until sometime earlier this year, because in the intermediate representation "plane" was ambiguous just like it is in English. It looks like that particular bit is fixed now, which is at least progress! Maybe they've been adding more non-English text pairs...
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    That's almost certainly accurate. The metalanguage / interlingua isn't English, but being based on A <-> English and B <-> English training, is all but certainly influenced by English grammar, words, and idioms, in ways that direct A <->B training would not be.
- _emacsomancer_ 7y ago
  It seems to be 'fixed' now, but once I was trying to translate from Hindi to Nepali (which are actually closely-related languages, think Italian and Spanish) with a simple sentence along the lines 'Ram came', where 'Ram' is a common Hindu name (effectively: 'John'), written in Devanagari with a long vowel: राम (rām). And I gave the Hindi input in devanagari (राम आ गया), but still the Nepali translation ended up being the equivalent of 'the sheep came' (भेडा आयो), so somewhere along the line it seemed to be treating the name राम (rām) as equivalent to the English string 'ram' and translating accordingly. So if the intermediate language isn't English, it certainly has some English-like properties....

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

subandi 7y ago

It's way off 'never off', I work with colleagues who use it en <> de. For example it will always translate 'order' in a sentence as 'Befehl' (I order you to fix a steak) instead of 'Bestellung' (I order a steak). Both are correct, but completely different, and in our context we never mean the former.