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.

I 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.

Similar 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.)

Deepl does offer https://linguee.de for single-word translations, explanation & contexts. Not sure why the link to it on the Deepl page is gone now.

Yep, though this too is auto-generated and not just an orderly list of the possible translations.

Does it translate pop music lyrics well? Google comes out too literal in its translations.

I'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.

> 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.

Ah 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!

I replaced Google Translate with DeepL a year ago in my goal of de-googling my life. I am very happy with the quality of the provided translation.

Same, the only feature I really miss is to be able to take a picture of text and translate that, specially when traveling..

It has a basic text recognition feature on iOS but I think it uses the iOS APIs so I'm not sure if they have a similar feature on Android.

My god, I live in the same city and I'd love to work there. Unfortunately, they've only been hiring senior engineers for years now and I'm not at that level yet. Maybe someday.

I guess they're not flush with cash. From what I noticed most small German/EU companies developing complex SW projects like this, that aren't backed by well funded VC funds, don't bother with hiring dozens of juniors like other unicorns usually do since they don't have the money. They prefer to wait and only hire the "perfect candidate", usually experienced seniors withe the right skills willing to work for the salaries they can offer, which isn't much.

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, which probably explains why they hire so rarely.

It's probably a business that's difficult to monetize successfully when Google, Microsoft, etc. are offering "free" solutions which are good enough for the casual use, and for professional use when big money is on the line, companies usually pay authorized translators(humans) anyway.

Software engineering salaries are just very low in Europe in general, when compared to the US. A junior in a major city in the US with a Bachelor's degree and no relevant job experience will make more than a senior with 10+ years of experience in Germany.

I'm not exaggerating: Kununu.com has €86,000 p.a. as the top-end for a "realistic" software engineering wage in Germany, glassdoor.com lists $84,000 p.a. as the low end for their "most likely" range.

I can't believe this still always comes up when discussing US vs any other country's salaries. Yes, a country where you have zero public healthcare, social services, no public higher education or state pension funds can have lower income tax thus higher salaries. And then pay 10k for a hospital visit. I will happly choose the other way every time.

Those salaries are gross salaries, not net. The much higher tax burden is on top of that.

Yep, worked in Germany and moving to North America, can confirm.

Base salaries are still a bit lower but the kicker is the missing equity

Can I ask with what visa did you go to the US? L1?

Canada so much easier, with express entry.

Not only seniors. Just python and go experts. https://jobs.deepl.com/

Automatic translation of the article with DeepL:

"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. Now the young company has closed a new round of financing and is considered the first "unicorn" from Cologne.

The Cologne-based online translation service DeepL 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 considered the first "unicorn" from the cathedral city.

The backers of the financing round include U.S. investors IVP and Bessemer, as well as the European venture capitalist Atomico, as "Business Insider" had initially reported. It initially remained unclear how many shares the firms would take. DeepL did not respond to an inquiry by Thursday afternoon. A "unicorn" is the term used to describe startups with a market valuation of more than one billion US dollars.

DeepL launched in Cologne in 2017 and now employs around 400 people. The website deepl.com with its translation service is one of the hundred most frequently accessed 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.

In independent tests, DeepL also outperformed 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 free of charge - a subscription is required for unlimited and additional features.

> German platform has been competing with Google Translate for some time.

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.

Automatic translation of the article with Google Translate:

"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.

Good! It's the only good (really good...) translation engine, and hey google don't even think about to buy it, everything good get's bad over time in your hands.

GPT-3 is from my experience better. I use both regulary however.

DeepL might not (yet) be as good as a good professional human translator, but I'd say it's already better than the average professional human translator. We have a contractor who translates technical texts from German to English and DeepL makes less mistakes and even gets some industry-specific terms right, whereas the human translator with no domain knowledge may correctly translate the term, but chooses a different one that immediately sticks out like sore thumb to anyone who works in the field. I'd rather give a text to DeepL and fix a few things than give it to contractor and still have to fix a few things.

I use DeepL on a daily base to translate German into English. I write longer German texts every second day. As I could write them probably myself in English too, DeepL just saves me a lot of time and eliminates double work!

We'll, Google built the playing though

For my use GPT-3 beats Deepl in translation quality by miles.

DeepL is insane. The "literature" department of the company that I work for uses it all the time to translate German to English and I can't barely tell that I'm reading a machine-translated text. It captures nuances and all, even on hardcore Mechanical Engineering texts.

Kudos to the DeepL guys, I'm near Cologne, would love to pay them a visit.

DeepL was great. They need to find their niche to compete with Google and others.

I hope they go after the enterprise translation market — too many websites rely on Google Translate, especially government websites.

Have a few friends who work there. But they have no needs for a subpar php backend developer :(

As others have pointed out, the quality of the translations is fantastic but I also really appreciate some of the features it has.

For example as a paid feature it allows you to switch between formal and informal speech, which can be really important in some languages/cultures.

Another is that it can translate PDFs while preserving formatting. Not perfectly but pretty damn good.

Yet another is that you can click on specific words and get more specific definitions of them, like a dictionary entry. This can be really useful if the translation seems ambiguous and you're wondering which sense of the word is being used.

They also have another product, Linguee, which is a multilingual dictionary. It's really good and usefully, contains real-world examples with their (human) translations.