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Several years ago, I tried some side-by-side tests of DeepL and Google Translate. The challenge was to take idiomatic humor from French websites and translate i
by ekidd 4y ago
Several years ago, I tried some side-by-side tests of DeepL and Google Translate. The challenge was to take idiomatic humor from French websites and translate it to English.
DeepL did a great job. It dealt with slang, informal grammar, and sudden shifts between formal and informal writing. It made some mistakes, but most of the jokes were still funny.
Google Translate produced near-incoherent gibberish for tougher passages.
DeepL was genuinely good for English/French. I can't speak to other language pairs.
- mahathu 4y agoI had very similar results with German<->English. DeepL was extremely good at translating subtleties between the languages and maintaining tone and context. Turkish<->German is a lot more difficult apparently, but the sentences often come out in a way you might theoretically say and understand, but you would never use in spoken language or in writing. Might be because the languages are very different and also culturally influenced, or maybe the training corpus is just way smaller.
- Aachen 4y agoSimilar in German. Not sure I tried side by side comparisons with Dutch but I didn't notice those being worse either. 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.)
- mc32 4y agoDoes it translate pop music lyrics well? Google comes out too literal in its translations.
- Bayart 4y agoI've used DeepL for Chinese recently, I used to use Systran, and it's really good, although it tends to bug out on gendering personal pronouns. 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.
- null_object 4y ago> DeepL was genuinely good for English/French. I can't speak to other language pairs. 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.
- flashgordon 4y agoAh the real test here I am afraid to say is how beautifully it can translate Asterix comics!! I read the entire set time to time every couple of years and I never cease to be amazed! Asterix fans must be crazy!