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A translation startup from Germany is surprising many users by how well it translates texts. It is now offering two more languages: Russian and Portuguese. What is it that makes DeepL better than Google Translate?
Translation giants like Google and Microsoft are faced with a powerful but small competitor.
The startup from Cologne, DeepL, was founded by a former Google employee. It provides a translation tool that produces more naturally worded text than any of its big competitors.
The service uses so called deep learning technology based on artificial neural networks. But how exactly does it work?
From dictionary to translator
Before the company launched the new translation tool in August 2017 it had been in the "language business" for quite some time. In 2009, they started a a dictionary called Linguee. What was special about it? Apart from various translation options, it offered samples of already translated pieces of text in chosen language pairs.
It gathered these text samples from the Internet using special Internet bots that help web indexing called web crawlers. Many text samples came from the documents of multilateral institutions like the European Union (EU).
A human-trained machine-learning algorithm then computed the structure and meaning of the gathered text and learned how certain...